ABSTRACT
A number of different theories about the nature of poetry and the poet coexisted in the Renaissance. In their formulation of these theories Renaissance poets and critics drew on certain key classical texts, but modified them in the light of their Christian beliefs. Aristotle’s Poetics (scarcely known in the Middle Ages) and Horace’s The Art of Poetry were the most important of these. A group of works on the nature of oratory, rhetoric, and on the role of the orator contributed directly to poetic theory: Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Cicero’s Orator and On the Orator, and Quintilian’s Education of an Orator. Plato was generally influential as reinterpreted by the Neoplatonists, but three works dealing directly or indirectly with poetic theory, Ion, Phaedrus and Republic X, were read in their own right. The educational theory of poetry was influenced by a minor essay of Plutarch, How the Young Man Should Study Poetry. There was a large body of Renaissance Italian criticism drawing on classical sources, but with important exceptions this went unread by English critics.
