Problems of Genre in Golden Age Poetry

Abstract

We cannot help coming back again and again to the same old questions: What is literature? What is poetry? What are the different kinds of poetry? I do think that there has been some progress toward giving tentative, historically circumscribed answers to these questions, but ever since Aristotle's Poetics progress has been relatively slow, and there is certainly no end in sight: there will always be some unborn Borges looming just beyond the horizon. And there has been, in my opinion, some retrogression, led by Romantic individualists, like Croce, for example, who try to fly in the face of pragmatic reality, the material reality of catalogues and libraries within which the reader-writer finds his way from history to literature, from plays to novels to poetry, from Petrarchan sonnets to Horatian odes to dramatic monologues. It seems highly likely that the reader and the writer, perhaps even the text itself, depend on some such categories as they organize their different activities and passivities of reading, of writing, of being read. In this paper I can hardly hope to scratch the surface unless I simplify some basic questions; I will do so by taking a pragmatic point of view, based on the social functions of literary discourse. Within our sociolinguistic world we are constantly involved in different types of speech act, as first demonstrated analytically by