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3 u 1 Poiesis and Modernity at the Turn of the Spanish Sixteenth Century: Luis Alfonso de Carvallo and the Cisne de Apolo (1602) Leah Middlebrook Basta, señora Lectura, que cuando pienso daros alcance, os acogéis y llamáis a sagrado (Enough, Dame Lectura, for just when I manage to grasp hold of you, you draw yourself up and invoke the sacred) —Cisne de Apolo The emergence of European modernity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is often discussed in terms of a secularization or “prosification” of the world. According to the narrative often recounted by moderns, in a pre-modern order the universe is conceived of in allegorical terms, as a complex system of resemblances whose relationships are best captured by figures and myths. Moderns find the kinds of truth associated with this order to be outdated at best; at worst, both they and the prophets and poets who disseminate them are archaic and corrupted, “rancida y caducar” (rancid and out of date), in the words of an interlocutor in the 1602 Cisne de Apolo by Luis Alfonso de Carvallo (151). Poetry, as the kind of language that preserves and transmits divine and human truths, in the manner of Dante’s canzone,1 is challenged by new modes of discourse: history, the eyewitness account, the verifiable statement. Poems fall into disrepute as utterances shaped by the will of patrons, directed to securing venial and worldly authority, and thus vulnerable to distortion and falsehood.2 The modes of utterance that emerged to take the place of the great poems tended to be prose ones, but that was not their only “prosaic” characteristic. The onset of modernity also entails the restriction of the power of language 4 LEAH MIDDLEBROOK to one specific domain. While pre-moderns understand words to be motivated by natural energies and affinities, such that they are capable of signifying—as na­ tural elements do—in multiple ways,3 the increasing hegemony of the modern perspective over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries confines verbal representation to one plane, that of discourse, in which language “still has the task of speaking that which is, but is no longer any more than what is said” (Foucault 43). As is well known, moderns occupy a paradoxical position vis-à-vis nature. On the one hand, enlightened by modern rational methods of analysis and interpretation, they view themselves as liberated from the deception that plagued their ancestors. On the other, mastery of the world and its secrets exacts a price, in the form of the sense of loss explored in so many branches of critical theory, the loss, for example, that informs Heidegger’s nostalgic distinction between techne, in the sense of poiesis, and the instrumentalist uses of nature that inform and are reinforced by modern technology.4 The diverse writings on poetry that circulated in sixteenth and earlyseventeenth -­ century Spain provide a wide spectrum of responses to this perceived sense of a breakdown in traditional ways of conceiving of relationships between people, language and the cosmos. They can be characterized as “early” modern for the profound ambivalence they maintain with respect to the relevance of poiesis and poetry to contemporary culture. For example, Renaissance humanists across Europe revive Horace’s “Letter to the Pisos.” Among other pieces of advice, this text cautions poets against attempting the poetic feats of Homer, advising them to work instead in the more delimited , urbane spheres in which they can aspire to success. The wide circulation of the “Letter” and of Horace’s ideas helped shift poetry into the ambiguous place it occupied in sixteenth-century culture: its authority was continually challenged, and yet not entirely dispensable. A poetry tailored to Horace’s specifications does not seek to disclose divine and cosmic truths. Primarily, it is an art of wit. And yet nearly all early modern writers who embraced Horace’s prosaic counsel (which is to say, nearly all early modern writers) were also clearly engaged by Orpheus and Amphion, two figures for a different notion of poetry. Orpheus was given the gift of song by the gods, who sent him to steer a savage humanity away from cannibalism. Orphic song thus wields a primordial civilizing power. “Amphion, who founded Thebes, / upraised its stones with lyric music and with charming words / could place them where he wished” (Fuchs 93). Horace, while an important early modern source for these myths, sets that type of poetic power firmly in the past: “This was the...

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