1976/01/01 by Peter Schwenger · 7 citations
Arts and Humanities · #Renaissance and Early Modern Studies #Medieval Literature and History #Poetry #Stanza #Theme (computing) #Literature #Epigraph #Metaphor #Art #Philosophy #History #Linguistics
paper · doi:10.2307/1770134
published in Comparative Literature 28(1), 65 (Duke University Press)
openalex publication_date 1976/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
HROUGHOUT his long treatise on the nature of wit, II Cannocchiale Aristotelico (Turin, 1654), Emanuele Tesauro suggests to the aspiring artist various methods for producing effective witticisms.' These methods seem curiously mechanical considering the well-nigh divine quality that Tesauro at other times attributes to wit. At one point, for instance, he assumes that the poet has been assigned as his theme the scene in the Bible where Magdalene washes the feet of Christ with her tears. The poet is first directed to restate the theme as a basic paradox: Magdalene's eyes simultaneously burn with love and flood with tears. This can be still further reduced to the opposed objects of fire and water. And it is these objects finally that are intertwined and divided in various ways to form what Tesauro calls a marvelous discourse. Readers of seventeenth-century English poetry will instantly be reminded of the most famous (or perhaps notorious) poem on Magdalene's tears: Richard Crashaw's The Weeper. And indeed traces of the same kind of method can be discerned in the poem. The use of unified contrarieties is blatantly apparent in the epigraph, which asks, Is she a FLAMING Fountain, or a Weeping fire ? A more protracted version is Stanza xvii: