Who is the ‘I’ in Early Modern Poetry? Marc-Antoine Muret on Poetic Action

Abstract

Biographical 'decoders' are stock characters among the dramatis personae of recent literary polemic. Indeed, critics have often claimed that poetry-and in particular early modern verse-is in no way about first-person expression, but must always be understood solely through intertextuality, self-referentiality and imitatio ,4 The claim is attractive, although false, or so I shall argue here. 1 shall ask whether sixteenth-century texts-here, in particular, 'lyric' poems-can be understood as first-person actions of an indirect sort. To suggest that poetry can be taken as a type of action is not, however, to say that first-person poetry is the expression of a 'self' -whatever that might be-and certainly not that the 'I' of the poem and the 'I' of the author are always equivalent. Nor is it to suggest that all genres of poetry relate similarly to the first-person stance or to poetic action. Like medieval poetry, sixteenthcentury poetry is highly imitative. It is not governed by an ideal of self-expression that might well have been unintelligible to