Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Alexander, Gavin

Titel

Sidney, Scott, and the proportions of poetics

Ist Teil von

• Sidney journal (Guelph), 2015-01, Vol.33 (1), p.7

Ort / Verlag

Sidney Journal

Erscheinungsjahr

2015

Quelle

Literature Online (LION eBooks)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• William Scott uses the word proportion or its cognates forty-seven times in The Model of Poesy. Scott's is a theory of poetry intensely concerned with the proportioning of poetry's parts to its wholes, and the proportionate arrangement --both conceptual and discursive--of poetics itself. It is also a theory driven by analogy--the Greek term for which proportion was the Latin equivalent. I explore the context of Scott's approach by asking what are the various proportions of early modern poetics. I then look at examples from Sidney's practice which help to draw out the implications of this approach. Proportion is also Scott's term for decorum. The decorous, analogical relatings of word to character to action, or mind to body to speech, or genre to verse form to occasion, or writing to painting that Sidney practices are illuminated by Scott's theory. In particular I show how a critical approach--intuited by Scott's contemporary John Hoskyns and explicated by John Carey--that finds Sidney's sentences emblematic of larger patterns is more fully accounted for in Scott's Model.