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 The Imitation of Classical Lyric Texts
in Renaissance Italian, French and Bnglish Lyric Poetry:
A Terminological and Typological Study

by

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Nicola Gardini

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A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
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Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Comparative Literature
New York University
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March, 1995

Approved
 UMI Number: 9603136

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UMI Microform 9603136

Copyright 1995, by UMI Company. All rights reserved.

This microform edition is protected against unauthorized

copying under Title 17, United States Code.

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ii

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 iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First, I wish to express my gratitude to Professor

Daniel Javitch, who has followed this thesis from its
inception to its completion. Professor Javitch was always
ready to give his advice whenever I needed it to move

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from one stage to another of my research. I thank him for
his methodological assistance and for his editorial
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review, which have helped me focus my thoughts, shape my
arguments and improve my writing style considerably. I
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would like to thank Professor Michel Beaujour for his
encouragement and his challenging suggestions. The
initial project has greatly benefited from them. I would
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also like to thank Professor Mich&le Lowrie for her

bibliographical information on ancient lyric and for her
intellectual sympathy.
The completion of this thesis has been facilitated by
a Lane Cooper Fellowship. I wish to thank New York
University, too, for awarding me this grant.
 iv

PREFACE

The code is unusually conspicuous, complex,

and enigmatic; it attracts an inordinate
amount of attention to itself, and this
attention has to acquire the rigor of a
method. The structural moment of
concentration on the code for its own sake
cannot be avoided, and literature necessarily
breeds its own formalism. 1

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This thesis studies the practice of literary
imitation in Renaissance vernacular lyric poetry of Italy
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(chapter II), France (chapters III and IV), and England
(chapter V), starting from a terminological analysis of
the critical vocabulary on imitatio (chapter I).
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Imitation is here considered a linguistic practice

intended to provide the modern text with a recognized
literary status. My approach is formalistic. It focuses
on the linguistic procedures and devices by which texts
reveal their generative principles and organize
themselves accordingly. As post-structuralistic theory
has taught us, texts speak of themselves. However, a text
does not necessarily do so to question its own
occurrence. Deconstructionism is off the point here. My
1 de Man (1979), 4.
 V

interpretation will rather be "constructionist". It will

attempt to show the pathways along which a given text
proceeds and reveals itself to be proceeding, by
imitating a preceding one, towards the acquisition of its
literary status. Every word in poetry is, as it were, a
technical word -all the more so in imitative poetry.
Poetic words are signs of a "special" language, an

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idiolect, which offers itself to be decodified. The
perpective adopted throughout will be, then, that of the
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encoding poet, not that of contemporaneous readers or
scholars, much less that of contemporaneous theorists of
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imitatio, who limited themselves to the perpetuation of
ancient topoi on imitatio. Indeed, the extensive practice
of imitation in lyric writing is here thought to serve
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both as a theoretical justification for the poet and as a

textual exemplar for his writing (the creation of, or
allegiance to, a lyric code), and ultimately accounts for
the lack of a systematic theorization of the genre until
the late Cinquecento. The generic (or morphological)
features appropriated from either Petrarch or the ancient
models appear to have functioned as sufficient guarantors
of literary legitimacy and dignity. In either case
imitation enables vernacular lyric to acquire universal
recognition and achieve the honorability of neo-Latin
poetry.
My analysis by no means, then, concerns itself with
such extra-textual issues as the readers' response, but
explores the modern poet's intention to belong to a given
tradition as this intention seems to be expressed and
fashioned in his lyric text. Indeed, one could speak of

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the intention of the text itself to emerge as endowed
with specific and determined characteristics according to
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the rules that it presupposes to have been fixed and
applied by the chosen model. The new text establishes, or
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attempts to establish, itself as a regulated artifact,
while the author actualizes his programme as an imitator
creating a poetic persona which claims his right to sing.
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Imitation, in the end, is a double procedure,

legitimizing the form of the new text on the ground of
its belonging to tradition and attributing authority to
the poet as a reincarnation of an ancient bard. The
modern poet becomes a contemporary, indeed a substitute
for his predecessor and his text is born as a classic.
The imitation of Petrarch constitutes the first and
propelling stage of Western European imitation. Reaction
to Petrarchism will determine a return to the ancients as
alternative models to Petrarch. One, then, needs to make
 Vll

distinctions between Italian, French and English

imitation and to view them as three successive, although
interrelated, aspects of one phenomenon. From this
perspective, Petrarch's own vernacular poetry does not
belong in a study of Renaissance imitation, since
Petrarch's work fosters, and still belongs to, a
humanistic culture, in which imitation entails the

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adoption of Latin, not of the vernacular - a culture
which vernacular imitation (i.e. in the vernacular and of
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a vernacular author, Petrarch himself) in fact
contributes, and is intended, to disrupt. Bembo, the
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theorist of European Petrarchism, is the initiator of
that tremendous disruption.
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 viii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments.................................... ill
Preface........................................... iv
I. Inventing Classical Modern Poetry: Renaissance
Imitatio and Imitative Typologies .................. 1

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II. Detaching Res from Verba: Bembo's Quest for a Modern
Lyric Code in the Vernacular.......................
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III. Finding Verba for Verba: Du Bellay's Revision of
Petrarch by Imitation of Ovid........ 94
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IV. Ronsard's Pindaric Odes: Reinventing french Lyricism
and the Poet's Task......... 151
V. Finding Res for Verba: Ben Jonson's Imitative
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Forest............................................ 211
Conclusion........................................ 268
Bibliography...................... 278
 1

CHAPTER I
INVENTING CLASSICAL MODERN POETRY:
RENAISSANCE IMITATIO AND IMITATIVE TYPOLOGIES.

Spesso avviene che d'una parola

il lume di una sentenza
s'accende.

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B. Partenio

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The necessity of this study emerges from the failure
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of most of the contemporary criticism on imitatio to
evaluate and describe Renaissance imitatio as a mode of
literary writing, not merely a theoretical debate. The
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debate over imitation left a number of treatises and

pronouncements, discussing whether the modern poet should
imitate ars or natura, multi or the optimus 1. At stake

1 The dispute was triggered by the letters that Bembo

and Pico exchanged on the subject in 1512: Bembo (1954).
It appears to be a rehearsal, or a continuation -as Bembo
himself admits- in the vernacular of the querelle between
Cortesi and Poliziano: Garin (1952), 902-910. This was
itself a culminating stage of the conflict started
between Ciceronianists and non-Ciceronianists around the
mid-Quattrocento: McLaughlin (1988), 72; on humanistic
Ciceronianism see Sabbadini (1885); Seigel (1968). For
the sequel of the debate see: the third book of Vida's
Poetica. Castiglione's Corteaiano I, 80-3, Delminio's De
imitationer Giraldi Cinzio's Super imitatione eoistola.
Calcagnini's reply to Giraldi Cinzio Super imitatione
 2

was the need to motivate literary production and create a

new language -two issues that only poetic writing could
ultimately address in a positive way. Contemporary
scholars have much too often concentrated on the reading
of treatises, or parts of treatises, on imitatio produced
in the Renaissance to find an explanation for the poetic
practice. There is no necessary correspondence between

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critical literature and poetic products, nor is there
meant to be one. I wonder what practical usefulness a
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Renaissance poet engaged in textual imitatio could have
found in the description of imitatio as a digestive or
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transformative process. The questions to answer would
still remain: how and what of the original whole to
digest or transform? To make poetry square with treatises
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and metaphors of imitatio is a preoccupation, and a bias,

of twentieth-century professors, not of the first
Renaissance commentators on imitatio. A "rhetoric” of
imitatio, with a set of prescriptions, does exist, but it
is a later phenomenon, and, as such, it should be
analyzed separately as a new stage in the history of
Renaissance imitatio, i.e. as a conceptual shift whereby,
in the second half of the century, the notion loses

commentatio. Ricci's De imitatione. and Partenio's

Dell'imitazione poetica.
 3

ground as an autonomous and sufficient approach to

literary production. The exhaustion of the debate over
imitatio then gives way to the emergence of Aristotelian
criticism and the creation of literary genres. Under the
sign of Aristotle's Poetics theory and practice start to
proceed together, one becoming the justification of the
other. The term "imitatio" ceases to be used in the

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humanistic or Bembian sense of "imitation of
authoritative texts", "literary imitation", as in
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classical criticism, and starts to be employed constantly
in the meaning of "Aristotelian mimesis" 2. Consequently,
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literary imitatio ceases to be a general theory of
literature, while the debate continues in the form of
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2 Very clarifying is Waszink (1979), 46-7 on the

meaning of the classical term imitatioi "la reflexion du
poite sur son mitier a ... existe dans la littirature
latine des le stade primordial, et que c'est 1'existence
mime d'une telle reflexion qui a pripari le terrain pour
l'acceptation de 1'imitation littiraire A Rome comme une
chose naturelle et mime Avidente; je dis 'de 1'imitation
littSraire' - il va de soi qu'une interpretatio latina de
textes grecs ne saurait s'elever a la conception de
1'imitation au sens philosophique, c'est-A-dire A une
conception de l'art comme imitation de la r£alit£, comme
speculum vitae. L'influence du stade initial se montre
dans le fait qu'en g&n§ral dans la litt&rature latine on
ne trouve que peu de passages ou' le terme imitatio
dGsigne, non pas 1 'imitation d'un auteur, mais la
representation de la r6alit6 [my emphasis]. Dans ce
contexte, le fait est particuliirement significatif que
dans L'Art poStique d'Horace le mot imitator, qui s'y
trouve deux fois (v. 134 et 318), n'indique pas le poite
comme mimetis tod biou."
 4

genre theory. Indeed, already in some of the writers of

treatises on imitatio, imitation is related to the
various "genera scribendi", as in Calcagnini and Ricci,
and Bembo himself in his De imitatione seems to have been
aware of the issue of genres. But the enduring influence
of the classical partition between poetry and prose makes
it still difficult for such writers to develop a critique

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of specific modes of writing. The transition from one
idea of imitatio to the other can be argued to occur with
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Tasso's poetical and critical work. Tasso faces both the
theoretical problem of generic orthodoxy along
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Aristotelian lines and the practical issue of imitating
classical models, like Virgil and Homer, that give
generic status to his poems. The Aristotelianization of
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classical imitatio is complete. In 1560, in the silence

following the end of humanistic querelles, Bernardino
Partenio releases the first treatise on literary
imitation that dictates rhetorical rules for imitators,
Dell'imitazione poetica. It is not a fluke. Partenio is
the first author of treatises on imitatio to connect
traditional imitation with Aristotle's Poetics.
The contemporary criticism on imitatio not only
disregards, or pays little attention to, the historical
development of the concept of imitatio which I have here
 5

rapidly described, but, purporting to explain literary

practice by relying on what were more abstract aesthetic
speculations than critical or prescriptive discourses on
poetic writing, it neglects the fact that, before the
invention of genre theory, the actual practice of
imitatio served to define literary canons and linguistic
codes. G. W. Pigman's much-cited article on Renaissance

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imitation embodies a telling instance of such criticism
on Renaissance imitatio 3. Pigman limits his research to
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a repertory of classical topoi on imitatio, whereby he
attempts to fix typologies of imitative procedures, to
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explore the modern author's alleged intention to link his
text with the work of a predecessor, and to classify
imitatio into three types: a. nontransformative
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imitation, a sort of imitation limited to the gathering

or borrowing of phrases; b. imitation, which is
transformative; c. emulation (or eristic imitation),
resulting in a critical reflection on, or a correction
of, the model. The fundamental shortcoming of such a
perspective is the assumption of normative and a priori
generalizations, which can only abstractly apply to the
intepretation of individual cases of textual convergence.
Because there is no direct link between theory and
3 Pigman III (1980), 1-32.
 6

practice, Renaissance treatises on imitatio are not to be

taken as reliable sources for an understanding of the
literary phenomenon. Textual exegesis is the only
critical approach capable of giving an objective idea of
the extent, goals and, ultimately, nature and
significance of the imitative practice on the part of the
Renaissance poets.

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The most successful attempt to study imitatio in the
practice of Renaissance poetry remains Thomas Greene's
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The Light in Troy, a book full of interesting textual
exegesis 4. Greene is also aware of semantic and
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conceptual transformation of the term after the middle of
the century 5. However, his grid of imitative modes
consists of a rephrasing and a development of Pigman's :
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a. eclectic or exploitative imitation (Pigman's following

imitation), which dehistoricizes the subtexts; b.
heuristic imitation (Pigman's imitation), which distances
itself from the subtext and forces the reader to
recognize the poetic distance traversed; dialectical
imitation (Pigman's emulation), which sets the semiotic
universe of the subtext against that of the imitative
text. The latter is the imitative mode on which Greene

4 Greene (1982).
5 Greene (1982), 180.
 7

nearly exclusively focuses as the most typical 6.

Greene's critical categories and types of imitatio, like
Pigman's, put too much emphasis on extra-textual notions,
such as competition and a dialectic between the modern
text and the classical text. Poetic memory need not be
reduced to the expression of an "anxiety of influence",
in Harold Bloom's sense. Poetic imitatio does not spring

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from the exclusive impulse to emulate 7. From this
perspective, the textual reality of the modern work would
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risk to be minimized, and imitatio would simply prove to
be an ensemble of psychological motivations, whereas in
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literature there is no psychological element which does
not result in a linguistic choice.
Imitatio, instead, is not so much a form of dialectic
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between the new author and the ancient model as it is a

shift within the new text from, so to say, invention to
repetition. Imitatio implies a radical rejection of
infinite options and intends to perform signification by
reference to an already available text, which functions
6 Greene introduces a fourth type of imitatio,
reproductive or sacramental imitation -the first of his
list- but does not make use of it.
7 I here agree with Javitch (1985b), 70-3. On the
contrary, imitatio and aemulatio tend to be one thing in
classical literature: see Conte (1986), 37; Waszink
(1979), 49-50; Russell (1979), 1-16. On the classical
notion of aemulatio see Quintilian's Institutio oratoria
10. 2. 9-11.
 8

as an accomplished literary code. Indeed, imitatio makes

existing literature one of the endless possibilities of
language. The questions to answer, then, are: what inner
motivations of the new work make the text recede from
creation and fall back on existing literature? What is
the relation between the new and the old in the modern
text? What is the result to be called?

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Imitatio needs to be inscribed within the broader
framework of linguistic production, and considered in
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terms of an active force in the creative process. In
imitatio signs, whether on the macro- or on the micro­
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level, do not stand for things, but for other signs; the
referent is not connected with non-verbal realities or
concepts, but with representations belonging to literary
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tradition and language. Imitatio ultimately results in a

sort of literary ambiguity - in Empson's sense, an
ambivalence pertaining to the literal significance of the
imitative passage and to its references to the imitated
text. Rephrasing the British critic's words, one can
claim that imitatio occurs when two intentions, which are
connected by being both relevant in the context, can be
given in one passage simultaneously 8. These two

8 Empson (1947), 102 thus describes his third type of

ambiguity: «it occurs when two ideas, which are connected
 9

intentions are 1) the impulse to write and 2) the

willingness to be recognized as adopting a specific type
of writing.
Imitatio is a means to organize and construct texts.
There is imitatio whenever the new text is deliberately
referring to another text in order to achieve fullness of
meaning and status - of course, involuntary

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reminiscences, which are always liable to possible
changes, lie outside the interests of this research on
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literary imitatio 9. I would not consider imitative such
a line of Petrarch as "A1 cader d'una pianta che si
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svelse", clearly echoing the sound pattern of Dante's "Al
tornar de la mente, che si chiuse" 10. This sort of
textual coincidence does not express any other contact
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with the earlier piece of literature than circumstantial

syntactic resemblance, springing from a convergence of
mnemonic, emotional and cultural stimuli, located in the
only by being both relevant in the context, can be given
in one word simultaneously**.
9 As is the case with Petrarch. In Familiares XXII,
2, 12-13, a letter addressed to Boccaccio, the poet
admits that he committed unconscious plagiarism in
several cases, especially in the composition of Laurea
occidens. Again, in Familiares XXIII, 19, he writes that
his secretary and pupil Malpaghini located in the
Bucolicum Carmen words of the Aeneid. of which he himself
was totally unaware. Petrarch, then, proceeded to alter
his text so that the classical subtext could not be
recognized.
10 See Contini (1969), 53.
 10

profundity of the poet's education and taste. These

similarities for the most part must escape not only the
readers', but also the authors' notice. They are "givens"
of literary language, occurring within the boundaries
imposed on spontaneous creation by poetic memory, as was
the case with Valfery, who found the rhythmical structure
of his Cimetifere marin. retrieving the obsolete paradigm

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of the d&casyllabe, before he invented the words. To want
to trace such procedures to clearcut motivations would be
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the same as to strive to explain the need for children to
use alphabetical letters after they have learnt how to
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speak. Sameness of verbal or phonetic patterns does not
necessarily entail imitatio. There must be a grammatical
intention - intentionality here being not a psychological
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category, but designating a textual project and

procedure, intended to realize or modify a recognizable
and specific code. As Gian Biagio Conte states,
"[i]ntention ... is [not] the compositional intention of
the empirical subject; it is the communicative intention
of the text, that is, the effect, the relation of meaning
which the text establishes with its reader" 11. Imitatio
is an "encoding" operation, attaining to the status of
style, inasmuch as style is, in Riffatterre's sense, a
11 Conte (1994), 133.
 11

sort of control over the reader's "decodage", exerted by

recourse to estranging elements 12. In the new text, to
use the Aristotelian principle of non-additivity
(Metaphysics 7,17,1041), the imitative passage and the
imitated locus constitute a whole, whose properties
("emergent properties") cannot be derived from their
single properties. The results of imitatio activate the

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recollection of the referent, and, at the same time,
represent a new literary accomplishment within a
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different context.
Three examples will suffice to show the variety of
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imitative practices and the necessity of a more specific
and consistent terminology, which identifies them and
explains their usages. For sake of critical clarity, I
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take them from clearly identifiable macro-textual

references- Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata and Petrarch's
Canzoniere (although these two fall out of the scope of
this research)- where it is easier to see how an
imitative procedure affects the whole in which it occurs,
I should like to start with a brief passage in the
Gerusalemme Liberata (IX, 81, 7-8), the physical
description of Lesbino:

12 Riffaterre (1971).
 12

giunge grazla la polve al crine incolto

e sdegnoso rigor dolce 6 in quel volto.

These two lines are an obvious adaptation of an Ovidian

distich, which has not escaped the notice of the
commentators: Phaidra's description of Hyppolitus's
virile beauty (Heroides IV, 77-78) 13:

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te tuus iste rigor positisque sine arte capilli
et levis egregio pulvis in ore decet.
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As is clear, Tasso's couplet tallies neatly with the one
in Ovid's epistle, even in its vocabulary.
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My second example, also taken from Tasso's epic poem,
will align the description of Armida with a vernacular
text - Petrarch's canzone 366. This poem is addressed to
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the Virgin Mary, to whom the pagan sorceress is eo ipso

blasphemously assimilated:

volse
inchina (GL IV, 34, 4-5)
volse...inchina (Canzoniere 366, 10)

Donna se...conviensi {G£ IV, 35, 1)

Donna se...convensi (Canzoniere 366, 98-9)

Vergine bella (GL IV, 37, 5)

Vergine bella (Canzoniere 366, 1)
13 For the presence of Ovid's works in Tasso's see La
Penna (1993), 43-55.
 13

si ridente apparve fuore

ch'innamord di sue bellezze il cielo (GL IV, 84, 6-
7)
al sommo sole
piacesti si che 'n te la sua luce ascose fCanzoniere
366,2-3)

dolci e care note (GL IV, 85, 1)

dolci e carl nomi fCanzoniere 366, 46)

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begli occhi (GL IV, 89, 3)
belli occhi fCanzoniere 366, 21)
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oscure e folte (GL IV, 89, 3) [rhyming with
"accolte"]
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oscuri e folti fCanzoniere 366, 21) [rhyming with
"raccolti"]

soccorso (GL V, 60, 1)

soccorri fCanzoniere 366, 11)
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e bella si che '1 ciel prima n£ poi

altrui non die maggior bellezza in sorte (GL V,60,l
2)
che '1 ciel di tue bellezze innamorasti,
cui nS prima fu simil, n# seconda fCanzoniere 366,
54-5)

Petrarch himself provides a noteworthy example of

"sacrilegious" imitatio in his canzone 264, where the
confession of his spiritual bewilderment is expressed in
Ovidian Medea's tones fMetamorphoses VII). The heroine's
words "aliurague cupido,/mens aliud suadet" (19-20)