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The Contingency of Form in Renaissance Poetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2024

Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld
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Abstract

Metaphrasis is an exercise of the English humanist schoolroom that harbors both a theory of form and a method of reading. From the perspective of metaphrasis, the central question one asks of a form is not what it is. Metaphrasis encourages us to ask, instead: What is the range of this poem's formal possibilities? What variety of forms might this poem take? What variety of forms should this poem take? Or what variety of forms would this poem take under a specific set of alternative conditions, whether we conceive of those conditions along historical, aesthetic, or ethical axes? In this essay, I take up a single stanza from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1596), and I argue that where form establishes the parameters of possibility for a poem, the critical activity of metaphrasis permits us to imagine the world of the poem otherwise.

Type
Essay
Information
PMLA , Volume 138 , Issue 5 , October 2023 , pp. 1094 - 1109
Copyright
Copyright © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Modern Language Association of America

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Footnotes

This essay is dedicated to Jacqueline T. Miller on the occasion of her retirement from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where she taught me and so many others to read The Faerie Queene. Thank you, Jackie.

References

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