1963/01/01 by Eugenio Donato · 8 citations
Arts and Humanities · #Renaissance and Early Modern Studies #Poetics #Impossibility #Tragedy (event) #Literature #Nothing #Philosophy #Morality #Subject (documents) #Dialectic #Poetry #Pride #Pleasure #Taste #Art #Epistemology #Law #Theology
paper · doi:10.2307/3042940
published in MLN 78(1), 15
openalex publication_date 1963/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
The literary quarrel that followed the publication of Marino's Adone brought into sharp focus the discrepancy between the taste of the period and its poetical theories which had not evolved so rapidly. Yet in no sense could the theoreticians have disregarded the work, so obvious was Marino's break with that literary tradition rooted in the Aristotelian poetics of the cinquecento. Sixteenth century Italian poetical theory was primarily concerned with establishing a difficult equilibrium between pleasure and morality on the one hand, artifice and truth on the other. The tragedy of Tasso clearly shows that this concern was deeply felt, and not merely a subject of idle discussion. For the cinquecento, these opposites were considered dialectical polarities; Marino was to show that for the seicento they were in fact nothing but arbitrary associations. The new poetic was a rejection rather than a d epassement, and the impossibility of salvaging the old categories may well have been the cause of the violence of the quarrel. Marino's work can be briefly described as the highly metaphorical expression of highly sensual material-each of these terms being carried to such an extreme as to leave no doubt about its being treated as an end in itself. The poet never really attempted to explain the theoretical implications of his poetical aims. His utterances against any rules and constraints,' his pride in his im-