Milli mála - 2021, Blaðsíða 191
190 Milli mála 13/2021
to poetic ontology, is not its only dimension. As Amie Thomasson
points out, literary texts are “neither (purely) mental nor (purely)
material; nor are they either concrete physical objects or timeless,
changeless abstracta.”20 Rather, they constantly renegotiate the re-
lationship between the two domains, mental and material. Willed
into existence by human imagination (itself corporeal), literary
texts assume a concrete physical shape as written, printed, vocal-
ized, or digitized objects subject to replication, corruption, and
destruction. Early modern poetic theory realized the dual impor-
tance of poems as imaginative constructs and material things.
Puttenham’s discussion of shape poems identifies in them a special
kind of “proportion” (i.e. harmony) that “yields an ocular represen-
tation” when lyric poems are “by good symmetry reduced into
certain geometrical figures.”21 His examples of lozenge- and dia-
mond-shaped poems reveal a close co-dependence of imagination
and matter in poetic ontology. Scott, in his remarks on the genre of
emblems, writes that it “admitteth some material object to the
discovering the conceit.” In this hybrid form, “the artisan brings his
portraiture as the body, the poet the speech and word as the soul,
neither being of use without the other, the body or picture as a life-
less carcase if it be not informed and actuated by the word as the
spirit, the word as an idle, fantastical air that hath no sensible
existence.”22 Poetic imagination and manual labour meet as em-
blems traverse the territory between mental processes (“conceit”)
and the physical shape in which imagination manifests itself (“sen-
sible existence”).
But all poetry—not just the marginal forms discussed by
Puttenham and Scott—depends on linkage of conceit and object-
hood, with every act of poetic imagination contingent upon some
sort of material support beyond language. Moreover, the non-lin-
guistic substrate of poetry is always historically embedded, for
every period endorses “instantiation templates”—the culturally
sanctioned prototypes of material support which determine the
physical shape a poetic event will assume to be recognized as such,
20 Thomasson, “Debates”, 247.
21 Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 179.
22 Scott, Model of Poesy, 81.
“PEN, PAPER, INKE, YOU FEEBLE INSTRUMENTS”
10.33112/millimala.13.8