feeling. So that he who reads may not recognize fragments from Cicero but the
reflection of a well stored mind.^9Imitation, then, did not mean for Renaissance poets an excuse for slavishness
or a pass on originality. Erasmus himself attacks such totalizing attitudes and
affirms that one reason that total imitation was bound to fail was because of
the historical situatedness of language. He may adore his Roman and Greek
authors but he shows himself to be refreshingly nimble on these matters when
he mocks his Ciceronian opponents who approve the ongoing usage of a
narrow, period-specific Latin. Erasmus cheekily replaces the early churches’
creeds with Cicero’s language and the result, as he well knew, seemed ludi-
crous to his readers. InThe Advancement of Learning, written just shy of the
hundred years after the Ciceronian battles, Francis Bacon writes that Eras-
mus’s scoffing echo generally overtook these opponents.‘In some’, writes
Bacon,‘the whole inclination and bent of those times was rather towards a
copy than weight.’^10 Words must have‘life of reason and invention’, he says,
or else to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture.^11
I might further argue that poets understand Bacon’s imperative of weight or
invention, the new and individualized content and specific voice that fulfils
imitation in a specific way because it isfinally their voice that must speak forth,
however imitating it is, and informed by preceding models. The poet’s voice
must break a silence that remains troublingly present even in the most potent
ancient text. For one poet to restate another’s vision requires the hard work of
understanding and bridging the past. Petrarch realizes this when he contem-
plates his prized manuscript copy of Homer and says famously,‘Alas! Your
Homer is silent for me, rather I am deaf to him.’^12 But this silence may actually
benefit the poet for it encourages, nay itnecessitates, poetic freedom. Imita-
tions’active originating, even perfecting component is also at the heart of
English poet Philip Sidney’sdefinition of art in hisAn Apology for Poetry:
‘Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in the word
mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, orfiguring fourth—so
to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture—with this end, to teach and
delight.’^13 Sidney argues later that a poet has greater impact than a historian,
for a famed example may be stronger than a true example because the fame
(^9) Erasmus,Ciceronianus, or A Dialogue on the Best Style of Speaking, trans. Izora Scott (New
York: Columbia University, 1908), 81–2.
(^10) Francis Bacon,Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning(London: Bell and Fleet
Street, 1861), 37.
(^11) Bacon,Proficience and Advancement, 37.
(^12) Francesco Petrarcha,Letters on Familiar Matters: Rerum familiarium libri XVII–XXIV,
trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 46.
(^13) Sir Philip Sidney,An Apology for Poetry, or The Defense of Poesy, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), 101.
Christian Humanism’s Legacy in Renaissance Poetry 177