ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the literary-critical metaphors of late sixteenth-century England, taking as its starting point Thomas Lodge’s 1579 call to “roote out those odde rymes which runnes in euery rascales mouth.” In contrast to the humanist poetics that envisioned poetic form as geometric, even transcendent, artifice, Lodge’s language (“roote out,” “runnes”) suggests the earthbound and invasive. In this, it belongs to a cluster of early modern metaphors that figure poetic structures (rhyme, metric feet, alliteration) as material, biological forms. Moving between Lodge’s, William Webbe’s, Gabriel Harvey’s and Edmund Spenser’s “ecopoetic” metaphors, this article proposes an early modern “ecopoetics.” It argues that to recognize how such poetic structures “act as quasi agents … with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” is to reapproach early modern poiesis, centering less on the individual poet’s delimiting techne and more on how extra-human patterns and rhythms find their way onto the page.

摘要

本文重点关注 16 世纪末英国的文学批评隐喻，以托马斯·洛奇 (Thomas Lodge) 1579 年的呼吁为出发点，即“根除所有流氓口中流传的那些奇怪的诗句”。人文主义诗学将诗歌形式设想为几何甚至超越的技巧，与之相反，洛奇的语言（“根除”、“奔跑”）暗示着大地的和侵入性的。在这一点上，它属于一组早期现代隐喻，将诗歌结构（韵律、韵律、头韵）描绘成物质的、生物的形式。本文在洛奇、威廉·韦伯、加布里埃尔·哈维和埃德蒙·斯宾塞的“生态诗学”隐喻之间穿梭，提出了一种早期现代的“生态诗学”。它认为，要认识到这种诗意结构如何“充当准代理人……具有轨迹、倾向、poiesis，较少关注个别诗人的界定技术，而更多地关注超人类的模式和节奏如何在页面上找到自己的方式。