"From Musaeus to Parnassus: Poetry, Modernity and Method in the Seventeenth Century"
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Date
2013
Authors
Middlebrook, Leah
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Calíope: Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry
Abstract
The narrative of a “new” mindset that dispenses with the mythopoetic in favor of the intellect is a foundational myth of modernity. Perhaps that is not surprising, given the powerful constitutive role which moderns attribute to the other; the “poetic,” perennially cast as the other of the modern, exercises its greatest generative force --the force of poiesis, with which the terms poesía and poema are associated in so many treatises-- within the modern imagination. This essay focuses on iterations of the modern origin story as I trace the stages by which primordial powers associated with poetry are deployed to anchor a “new” modernity in Spain and the Americas. I will also demonstrate that by the late baroque, poetry loses that power as modern institutions gain primacy over poetic energies. It is my contention here that for late-sixteenth and early seventeenth-century writers, the narrative of poetry’s subordination exercised a certain kind of daemonic force that was drawn from associations with prophecy and the divine that were invoked as much as they were suppressed, subordinated or excluded in their accounts.
Description
Keywords
Orpheus, Lyric, Poetry, Modernity, Early Modern Spain, Poetics, Amphion, Caramuel, Horace, Carvallo, Acuna
Citation
Middlebrook, Leah. “From Museaus to Parnassus: Poetry, Modernity and Method in the Seventeenth Century.” Calíope: The Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry. 18.1 (2013). 26-42. Print.