Disciplining creativity: Habit, system, and the logic of late sixteenth-century poetics

Abstract

Theorists of poetry from across early modern Europe dealt in different ways with a philosophical and practical challenge that attended any attempt to write about artistic skill: the systematising demands of theory, regulated by early modern logical norms, are often in tension with the indeterminate, dynamic, and habitual nature of the poet's art. English writers from George Gascoigne to William Scott register these methodological challenges, and a latent debate about the proper method for poetics, informed in part by the reading of continental theorists, may be traced through the corpus of English literary criticism.