The Italian canon Tommaso Garzoni spent the last six years of his short life publishing prodigies of erudition. First came The Theatre of Human Genius, The Universal Marketplace of all the Professions of the World, and The Lives of Famous Women from the Bible. The titles got stranger as he neared death: The Hospital of Incurable Madness, The Synagogue of the Ignorant, The Miraculous Cornucopia of Consolations, The Abstract Man, and The Seraglio of all the Wonders of the World (“Namely of monsters, signs, prestidigitations, lotteries, oracles, prophecies, dreams, astrological curiosities, miracles in general and marvels in particular . . . ”). He died in 1589 at age forty.
The Universal Marketplace (1585) is one of Garzoni’s most famous works. It details one hundred and fifty professions in its thousand pages, ranging from doctors and merchants to prostitutes, chimney sweeps, and scoundrels. Garzoni also devoted fifteen dense, authority-laden pages to the poets. On the first page alone he cited George of Trebizond, Paolo Suardo, Cristoforo Landino, Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Giovanni Andrea dell’Anguillara, Ariosto, Valerius Flaccus, and Tasso. The Universal Marketplace summed up everything the Renaissance knew about the poetic arts.
The poets are accorded the place of honor at the end of the tome, which began with a discourse on lords, princes, and tyrants. Since Garzoni’s marketplace was a circle, the two groups stood cheek-by-jowl in the plaza, and for good reason: the lords patronized the poets and in exchange received lavish praises in verse. And epitaphs when they died. Garzoni was so enamored of epitaphs that he provided twenty elegant examples, including one by Francesco Berni for the Duke of Mantua’s defunct dog:
Here lies buried in this pit
A ribald, treacherous pup
He was a nuisance but he was my love
Nothing else - he was the duke’s dog
The power was not all in the hands of the lords, though. Poets could also turn their word-smithery into vituperation. A poet was a “Cerberus who barks against anyone,” a “Fury who rages against everybody.” Aretino was called the scourge of princes.
Poets were divine, but their theology was controversial. Some believed that the poets had a kind of god inside of them that inflamed their souls and spurred them to speak. “And this is called divine furor, to be distinguished from that absence of mind that one calls madness” (Garzoni was an expert on insanity). Others held that poets endured violent alienations of the mind through their devotion to the muses, wine, prophecy, and love. Origen thought that they composed through a spiritual power that was nothing less than a purging of the soul and a clarifying of the mind. Some writers reasoned that if the gods could speak, they would only speak in verse. Angelic spirits helped Homer compose his poems.
Hermes Trismegistus was the first poet and the first theologian. He was the author of over ten thousand books, few of which survived into the Renaissance. In fact, just who exactly Hermes Trismegistus had been was a question that vexed many of Garzoni’s contemporaries. Francesco Patrizi reexamined the evidence in his gargantuan New Universal Philosophy. His conclusion: there must have been five Hermeses, not one, but only two of them had been Trismegistus (“thrice-great”). Patrizi claimed to have redacted Hermes scientifically, or according to a true understanding of Hermetic philosophy, and compared his effort to collect the philosophical fragments of the Corpus Hermeticum to Isis’s labor of retrieving the members of Osiris’ torn and scattered body: “It is thought that Osiris – to whom another Hermes, the grandfather of our Hermes, was a counselor – was killed by his brother Typhon, and his body torn apart and dispersed abroad. Isis, his sister and wife, sought with great labor for the pieces of his corpse and collected them into one body, though some parts were missing. Evil fate, another Typhon, not only rent Hermes’ books into an incredible number, but also gave them utterly to oblivion. A few books have survived such ruination, and a few certain fragments from others, all of which we have united into one body, in which we have sought to place the members back into their appropriate places and have eradicated the many blemishes as best we could.”Poets, those grandchildren of politicians, end up as scattered and forgotten as the fragments with which they composed their poems.
Hermes was the greatest of the theologian-poets, but not the last. Garzoni pointed to the prophets of the Old Testament as proof that poets were created to praise god. Even pagans knew this. Virgil and Ovid, for instance, were Christian poets despite their ignorance of Christ: “So: a Spirit inwardly nourishes the heavens and the earth and the shining orb of the moon and the stars of the sky” (Aeneid VI.724) or “God and a better nature settled this conflict” (Metamorphoses I.21). Garzoni referred readers to Antonio Mancinelli’s Mirror of Poetry for further examples of verses that confirmed Catholic truth.
Poets were philosophers, too. Strabo thought they taught ethics. Heraclides Ponticus believed they taught natural philosophy: “the winds and tempests, the motions of planets, the cycles of the seasons, and other natural things.” Lucretius’s epicurean epic on the natural and moral order was the most famous philosophic poem, but that genre was not alien to the Italian poets of the Renaissance. Politian was the greatest of the neo-Latin poets. His Rusticus (Country Gentleman) cannot be read even by most classicists without a dictionary, so dense is it with trees, flowers, and wildlife. Politian, incidentally, did not locate the origins of poetry in the godlike Hermes Trismegistus and his pupils, passed down from genius to genius in esoteric succession. Poetry was a sacred contagion that infected people the way a magnet attracts bits of iron.
Poets also turned their talents to mundane matters. Garzoni agreed with Theophrastus that their works were a big help to orators, who borrowed their beautiful descriptions, graceful metaphors, ornate comparisons, and elegant expressions from verses. Who can describe wars or heroic enterprises better than a poet? Garzoni was not surprised that legal experts sometimes rely on the testimony of Homer and Virgil.
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Eliot Weinberger is one of America’s most learned literary critics. He cut his teeth in the seventies as a translator of Octavio Paz, but he is as much an advocate of Chinese poetry and American modernism as of Spanish letters. He has published several anthologies and volumes of essays. James Laughlin said that Weinberger was the most erudite person he had met since Ezra Pound. His serial essay, An Elemental Thing, lives up to the promise of its title: it is a stark beauty that restores non-fiction to its place among the arts.
Weinberger’s erudition is matched only by his pessimism about the state of contemporary poetry. At his most coy, he suggests that so much poetry is produced in America that nobody can come close to mastering the field. There may be great poetry being written somewhere in the American Empire, but not in one’s own province. In truth, however, Weinberger knows exactly whom to indict for the overproduction of terrible writing. Unlike so many cultural critics, he does not blame capitalism, the endless encroachments of the market on our lives. The twin villains of his story are academe and the National Endowment for the Arts. Weinberger is no enemy to the genre of praise-and-blame.
Time was when poets were the trustees of cultural memory. They restored meaning to words and invented new mythologies. Clayton Eshleman fashioned the first compelling myth since Darwin by communing with the Paleolithic. Ezra Pound realized that “all ages are contemporaneous” and pillaged world history for his Cantos. If needed poets served as detectives or historians. When Trungpa Rinpoche violently humiliated W.S. Merwin during a Halloween Party at the Vajradhatu Seminary, Ed Sanders and his team of investigative poets uncovered the truth in The Party. The finest work of William Carlos Williams, Lorine Niedecker, and Charles Reznikoff were tangy distillations of historical moments.
Sometimes poetry called for grand gestures. Reznikoff had the wrong day for his outdoor poetry reading, but as it happened to be a beautiful Sunday afternoon in New York, he decided to read anyway. Within fifteen minutes a crowd of a hundred people had gathered to listen to his poem. When Qu Yuan was banished on trumped-up charges, he wrote "On Encountering Sorrow," thereby founding Chinese poetry, and drowned himself in the Miluo River to protest the injustice of the world. The narrator of Qu Yuan’s poem had failed to find a wife among goddesses and mythical princesses. Suicide is a common activity among poets.
Poets were the Conscience. They were enemies of institutional oppression by church and state, academe and industry, enemies of sexual repression, racism and sexism, the charmlessness of the bourgeoisie, the myth of progress, and the destruction of the natural world. Oppen on Mao Zedong's Seven Poems: "The piece as a whole - poems and accompanying commentary - gives some inkling of the way in which poetry is deeply involved in a politics that is radical enough to ask questions of purposes and desires.” Poets asked questions to save the state:
Heaven’s mandate is not assured.
Who is punished, who succored?Nine time Qi Huan convened the Dukes.
His life was smothered nonetheless.
But something went wrong in 1970: a convenient date, according to Weinberger, for the apocalypse of American poetry. That was the first year of the Directory of American Poets (“it resulted in unlisted poets being refused work”). That was the moment when creative writing programs blossomed and when Black Studies and Women’s Studies departments appeared. Worse, the National Endowment for the Arts, set up in 1965, was by then disbursing its grants and stipends. “In all, the beginning of poetry as an acceptable, quasi-unionized, middle-class career in America.” Poets were now wards of the state and of the universities.
The Arts Bureaucracies had a stultifying effect on American letters. Writers such as Langston Hughes were ghettoized in Black Studies while authors such as Pound or Williams luxuriated in the English Department, which remains the province of white males. It has embroiled poets in academic rather than artistic politics. It has led to the triumph of obscurantist literary theories, the celebration of complexity and self-irony: “American poetry has become a village with more anthropologists than Eskimos – a village where the Eskimos are making tourist art for their own consumption and can no longer tell a story without deconstructing their ‘belief system.’" Weinberger was disgusted by the way academe had ignored Kenneth Rexroth during his forty-year career as a poet only to embrace him with gusto after his death: “Now, with a special issue of Sagetrieb (‘A Journal Devoted to the Poets in the Pound-Williams-H.D. Tradition’ published by the University of Maine at Orono) the ivy gates are opening to admit Mr. Rexroth. People will make a living explaining him, and the mountains of his life and work will swarm with curiosity-seekers, pedants, muck-rakers and axe-grinders, all as tiny as the figures in a Chinese landscape painting. It's easy to imagine what Rexroth would have said about them - but what will they make of Rexroth? How will they take the most readable American poet of the century and render him difficult - that is, requiring explication, better known as ‘teachable’?” The English Department is late to the funeral but eager to exhume the dead.
Weinberger wants erudite, inventive, politically-engaged poets. But the Arts Bureaucracies have neutralized radical voices on both the Right and the Left. The English Department is not interested in invention and Creative Writing is not interested in erudition. Rexroth (before his death): "There is no place for a poet in American society. No place at all for any kind of poet at all."
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Of course, American poets were not like other poets. They were devotees of Hermes Trismegistus, followers of esoteric wisdom, an aesthetic elite. T.S. Eliot’s aristocratic fetish is well known, as is Ezra Pound’s worship of enlightened despots such as Benito Mussolini. Allen Ginsberg believed that only he and his poet friends were entitled to the age-old secrets of the Tibetan gurus: “this kind of wisdom was always supposed to be secret. Nobody was supposed to know about it except the gurus and masters of the world, who were ruling everything from the top of the Himalayas.” The poets spoke in secret languages. They were shamans. They had the power of names, could conjure meaning out of the chaos.
Mnemonists, sages, bureaucrats, mystics: Weinberger’s poet is a Frankenstein’s monster. It is a composite of modernist (mis)readings of archaic traditions in which elements from different canons get endlessly recombined to serve the aesthetic purposes of the poet. It is easy enough to find societies were “the poet” is a chronicler, a keeper of traditions, a critic, a prophet, a shaman, but in no cultures is he all of them. In West Africa, the Mande griot is a chronicler and keeper of traditions, but there is an important distinction between the content of his epic poems and the privileged esoteric knowledge of power-societies like the komo and poro. Nor does the griot produce vaticinatory poetry. Weinberger’s poet is a modernist myth which, as he himself has observed, the modernists were never able to live up to. The poets most obsessed with conscience were also the greatest advocates of evil and the most likely to ally themselves with nefarious forces.
Weinberger imagines a poet who is a valued member of society and an enemy of tyranny, but reality was often the other way around. The poet was an outsider who, paradoxically, had the voice of power. The Mande griots were not only casted, but generally regarded as liars, flatterers, and ne’er-do-wells. They had to bury their dead differently from other members of society (their corpses were placed in hollow trees). Often griots were quarantined in special villages and trotted out only during military campaigns to inspire soldiers with their buffooneries and their music. "The blacks treat them like dogs, and they do not dare enter into any home except that of the nobleman, and if they are found in the village they are beaten with sticks." Early Portuguese explorers, seeing how they were mistreated by their fellows, mistook them for Jews.
Part of Weinberger’s confusion is that he does not distinguish between people who produce poetry, people who are poets, and the literary artifacts that we call poetry. This becomes problematic as soon as one starts looking outside the modern West. The Quran is written (or revealed) in verses, yet Muhammad was so explicitly not a poet that he could even be described as an anti-poet. The “poetry” of Scandinavian funerary inscriptions was produced according to a kind of generative grammar: no poet necessary. Nor were the sibyls of antiquity poets although they uttered their prophecies in verse. The culprit here is Weinberger’s deep need for the Author. More than once he mocks academics for their declarations about the death of the author or their retreat into amorphous discourses: the hidden silences and deep politics of the daffodil. On Pessoa’s heteronyms: “If one were that egoless, one would not be a writer.” What’s weirder is that Weinberger wants to invent authors even when there is no need. Before he can discuss the anonymous Tian Wen, the heavenly questions quoted above, he has to assume that none other than Qu Yuan wrote the poem. His excuse is that there used to be a theory that if Shakespeare hadn’t written his plays, then somebody else named Shakespeare had.
Weinberger’s attitude towards poets is troubling enough for texts with known authors. The concern is downright incoherent for the composite works of antiquity. As Robert Alter has shown, even that most hybrid of texts, the Bible, is first and foremost a literary creature and may be read as such. But we need not have waited for Alter’s arguments. Traditional scholars in the West and in China have always treated their classics as unified pieces of literature even when they suspected multiple authors. Only when source-criticism got married to history after centuries of an on-again, off-again relationship did readers become more interested in breaking down a text into authorial chunks than in appreciating the whole. And not even always then. Friedrich August Wolf founded modern Homeric studies when he demonstrated that the epics were composed by an oral poet. They owed not to the virtues of the pen but to the gifts of the Muses, those goddesses of the memory. They were full of interpolations at the hands of the rhapsodes who recited Homer’s poetry and the writers who stitched together the poems into a coherent whole. Yet if Wolf dissected Homer, he was not inclined to put the poems under the same scalpel. The integrity of the author hardly mattered to the beauty of the text. After all, Homer never sought immortality for his own name or declared an ambition for fame. “Indeed, he often proclaims that wicked and outstanding deeds are bequeathed to fame by means of his song, but he also affirms that the most recent song is most popular among listeners. But, in general, that age, playing as it were under its nurses's eyes and following the impulse of its divine genius, was content simply to experiment with beautiful things and to offer them for the delectation of others."
The principles of source criticism with which Wolf redacted Homer had also been known to Garzoni and Patrizi, but they were not obliged to them. They were happy to glorify poets and divinize poetry without bothering with philology. Patrizi deconstructed the figure of Hermes Trismegistus but chose to reorder the Corpus Hermeticum according to philosophic rather than critical principles. When Lucian asked Homer in the underworld about the verses considered counterfeit by the critics, the poet answered simply, "they were all his."
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Florence was the birthplace of civic humanism. Its citizens were committed to republican ideals and scholarship. Its propagandists produced the finest histories of the Renaissance and some of the best philologists. And yet Florentine poets, as in democratic America, were not only partisans of Hermes Trismegistus: they were the first to gather the torn pieces of his body and put them into some semblance of order. The key figure was Marsilio Ficino, physician, vegetarian, misogynist, mystic, and translator of Greek philosophy. His major work, Platonic Theology, is full of proofs for theses such as, "Love is most blessed because it is good and beautiful.” For Ficino poetry springs from divine frenzy, and divine frenzy comes from God. The poet’s harmonies and rhythms imitate the celestial music. They free man from earthly dross and help him taste the nectar of the heavens. Poetry was medicine: didn’t Empedocles cure diseases with chants rather than with herbs? Ficino’s theories formed the philosophical counterculture of the Renaissance, the Platonic alternative to Aristotle. It was an aesthetic for an elite who had leisure to cultivate the esoteric pleasures of the mind.
Renaissance Italy was a land of republics, but few of its famous poets were republicans. Dante wrote an eloquent and impassioned defense of monarchy. Petrarch had time for only one republic, the one that flourished in Rome between 509 and 44 BC, and advocated a life of solitary contemplation. Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso were creatures of the Este, who ruled Ferrara. The scurrilous Aretino was a hanger-on of the papal court. Politian was on Cosimo de’ Medici’s payroll. Francesco Filelfo, a minor poet but a major philologist, dedicated a 12,000-line epic called The Sforziard to the despot Francesco Sforza.
Machiavelli was one of the few poets of the first rank who was a devoted republican. He had nothing but scorn for the Sforza dynasty. Francesco had won Milan through military prowess, but his sons were lazy in war and lost their dukedom. Then their uncle brought ruin onto Italy when he invited the French king to invade the peninsula in 1494. The Italian Wars only came to an end in 1559 with the Spanish king in control of most of Italy. Walt Whitman, who “was no stander above men and women or apart from them,” conceived his poetry of democracy while the nation marched toward dissolution and civil war. The most political American poetry of the twentieth-century was composed during the thirties and the sixties, decades of disquiet and revolution. But the Italian poets, drunk with Platonic philosophy, flocked to the princes during the mayhem of the Italian Wars. Machiavelli, despite his republican loyalties, closed his Prince with an exhortation to free Italy from the barbarians. The time was ripe for a new prince to heal Italy’s wounds, to put an end to the sacking of her cities and the despoiling of her countryside. Italy needed a hero.
Ficino: “God uses the wise for governing and the mad for revelation."
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Some poets celebrated despotism for the tyrants they served while others wrote about life in the country. Others swallowed their hatred of monarchy when the times called for a strong ruler. And so on, in whatever combination you choose. The relationship between poetry and the civic world is perverse, and if there is any idiosyncratic specimen of humanity, it is the poet. That is one reason for being suspicious of Weinberger’s account of the death of modernism in America. There is no obvious reason why a class of poets independent of aristocratic patrons and liberated from the need to earn a living shouldn’t celebrate their freedom in an orgy of democratic poetry. Even if the institutional atmosphere is as noxious as Weinberger believes, why don’t tenured faculty write the poems they please, without a care for professional consequences? Why don’t radical poets defy the Arts Bureaucracies by writing complex pieces that elude the censors?
Cultural renaissances are the products of mysterious forces. Historians armed with the latest theoretical tools remain unable to explain the astonishing creativity of ancient Athens or late medieval Florence. Ditto with the Abbasids, the Ottomans, the Tang, the Song, the Mughals, and so on. The causes of American modernism are equally obscure, and its decline is even more so. Then there are the renaissances manqué: the ones that never happened despite civic energy, vast empire, or rich courts. But if we should not believe Weinberger’s story about the demise of American poetry, he has at least identified the genus and species. Cultural renaissances are all about translation, appropriation, assimilation. And, by implication, rejection.
Poets were next to the princes and lords in Garzoni’s marketplace, but they were also next to the rag dealers. These were the poorest members of the community, often Jews, who went about the city gathering wretched scraps of clothing. “All rags wind up in the ghetto,” Garzoni said. Rag-dealers were experts at concealing the defects of goods, of fobbing off rotten articles for sound ones. They had no honor. They kept company with thieves. Sometimes they sold garments infected with plague.
Principal Sources
Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative
Eric Charry, Mande Music
Marsilio Ficino, Letters, 8 vols., ed. Kristeller
———, Three Books on Life, ed. Kaske & Clark
———, Platonic Theology, vol. 2, ed. Hankins & Allen
———, Commentaries on Plato, vol. 1, ed. Allen
Tommaso Garzoni, La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (1605)
Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Principe, ed. Burd (1891)
Francesco Patrizi, Nova de universis philosophia (1591)
Politian, Silvae, ed. Fantazzi
Eliot Weinberger, Works On Paper
———, Outside Stories
———, Karmic Traces
———, An Elemental Thing
———, Oranges & Peanuts for Sale
———, ed. American Poetry since 1950
———, ed. The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry
———, ed. World Beat: International Poetry Now from New Directions
Friedrich August Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer, ed. Grafton et. al