ABSTRACT

The psychic mobility with which ingegno was consistently linked that it intend to emphasizes, and in particular its frequent identification with those volatile spirits. That we're centrally important in both Aristotelian/Galenic humoral psychology and in the Neoplatonic and hermetic traditions of natural magic. It examines the perspectives on poetic utterance formulated in Campanellas Potica and Donnes Anniversaries in the context of this tradition. On first sight, John Donnes gloomy account of the worlds atrophy in the Anniversaries would seem to have little to do with Campanellas affirmation of the worlds vitality and of poetrys capacity to realign us with it. Balm, in Paracelsian philosophy, is another term for the astral body or principle of vitality occulted in all things. Indeed Paracelsus argues that even corpses preserve some of this vitality, since in his essentially dynamic vision of matter there is no such thing as absolute lifelessness.