Donne and Spenser

The debate between Rosemond Tuve and William Empson in the 1930s over Donne’s use of logical
argument and rhetorical inventio in his poetry is symptomatic of the continued influence of the eighteenth
century rejection of dialectical parts of rhetoric i.e. invention and disposition. Ramus’s separation of the
domains of the arts of the trivium, i.e. grammar, logic and rhetoric has been mistakenly interpreted by
scholars like W.J.Ong as the primary cause of the modern understanding of rhetoric as elocution. Such
critics fail to realize that the efforts of Ramus and Talon had, on the contrary energized the process of
using invention theory in writing poetry. We have only begun to understand the importance of this theory
for poets like Donne and Spenser, falsely separated by the nineteenth century zeal of periodization and
labelling of poetic groups. On the contrary these two poets drew theoretical sustenance from common
foreign and native sources and particularly Ramist reform of rhetoric. Donne, standing at an edge of
awareness of recent intellectual discoveries found a potent source of strength in exploring the excesses of
logical thought in the processes of invention of arguments and images from the topics of comparison,
definition, division, in fact all the ten topics of Ramus’s logic. The arguments of disjunction and
dissentany, favoured in Ramist logic offered him a marvelous opportunity for inventing many an
argument. I will attempt to comment on the terms ‘conceit’, ‘strong line’ and ‘catachresis’ as ways in
which different ages tried to come to terms with the peculiarities of Donne’s poetry by analyzing his
Songs and Sonnets and the two Valediction poems.

The critical contribution to an analysis of Spenser’s rhetoric has been sparse compared to that of Donne.
Early in the Sixteenth Century Abraham Fraunce had found Spenser’s poetry rich enough to draw
illustrations for all logical arguments in an entire logic manual, i.e. The Shepherds Logic.