The concept of poetic invention in sixteenth-century England

Résumé

The term invention had a considerably wide range of meanings in the sixteenth century: it referred to a mental faculty, the application of that mental power, its artistic or non-artistic products, and to the idea that occurred in the artist¿s mind and that guided the generative process. Furthermore, all arts and sciences were thought to have been invented and therefore were inventions themselves, and invention was a praiseworthy aspect in good literary compositions. In the Renaissance, invention was a necessary requirement for the good orator and the outstanding poet. Invention was an indispensable condition for good poetry, an obligatory term for sixteenth-century poets in describing the process of excellent poetry writing, and a necessary mental requirement a good poet had to have. Additionally, it referred to the most precious quality of a literary composition, to the essence that distinguished it from previous works and made it special, to what separated it from slavish imitation of worshipped models and from translation, and finally, what awarded everlasting poetic glory to an author. The working hypothesis of my doctoral research is that, in the history of the relation between imitation, invention and imagination, the sixteenth century constitutes a key moment of transition. The Renaissance concept of invention appears caught in between the omnipresent notion of imitation inherited from classical theory and the indisputable importance assigned to imagination by the Romantics in later centuries. It carries a clearly distinct meaning nonexistent in Classical theory and never again alive after the radical shift initiated by Romanticism. Thus, the sixteenth-century concept of poetic invention, while still oozing with the implications of its parent-concept (that of rhetorical invention), smoothly guides the passage from the Classical notion of literature as imitation to the conception of literature as the product of the author¿s creative imagination and original thinking. My approach is global and inclusive, and I have relied upon a myriad of texts: entries to sixteenth-century English dictionaries, grammars, books on rhetoric and poetics, sixteenth-century defences of poetry, emblem books, prefaces to translations into English, manuals for the teaching of foreign tongues, poems, plays, and in general any document that contains reflections on the concepts of invention, imagination and imitation.