And then here is my favourite by Robert Hanks. I’ll let you judge this
metaphor as you will:‘Poetry is the microwave oven of the arts.’^33 I must
briefly add that this Acts chapter resonates in our Renaissance humanistic
setting too. We just heard,‘All that believed had all things common’, and
Erasmus collects this very same comment from Euripides, Aristotle, Terrence,
and Cicero in hisAdages, a compilation of aphorisms that grew to four
thousand entries. Kathy Eden has pointed out that this phrase of having things
in common reverberates through Erasmus’s own relation to his collection and
the tradition it codifies:‘the plucked plums’of the Greek and Roman authors
were thus made in common or commonly available in his text, so consequently
hecan count these ancient authors as his friends.^34 And he claimed that
amicitia, or friendship, had driven him to compile this collection. That is,
his friends—his living friends—now held this legacy in common, thanks to his
efforts. This bond of friendship with the dead and living, then, illustrates
perhaps the high sense of of collaboration that should spur us forward in our
own higher education environments, onward to what Constance Furey calls
‘the religious republic of letters’,^35 whose ideal setting is the learned meal, the
convivium, which Cicero defines as‘the communion of life’.^36 Among Renais-
sance humanists, this communion of life was often formalized and Christian-
ized as a religious society of human solidarity.
Our two main themes of imitation and collaboration converge strikingly in
the Renaissance imagination, insofar as these scholars and poets frequently
approached their ancient or even their contemporary peers with a penchant
for vivid personification of writing, so that the books themselves would speak
forth and converse with them. The text became a representational stand-in for
the living human beings who had written them, and who, in most cases, were
long dead at this point and unavailable for intellectual contact. We return to
Petrarch for brilliant examples of this communion through literary conversa-
tion. In a series of letters, Petrarch addresses famous men such as Cicero,
whom he vividly imagined speaking from therostrumwhen he walked through
the room into the Roman forum. Petrarch also models the humanist fascin-
ation with literary dialogues, gathering together famousfigures from history
to bring their thoughts to bear on the author’s own concerns. This is the case,
for example, in Petrarch’sSecretum, which features a dialogue between his
(^33) Robert Hanks,The Independent, 5 October 1994, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-
entertainment/poetry-a-verse-to-publicity-its-national-poetry-day-poets-are-everywhere-
television-radio-even-1441155.html, accessed 13 February 2016.
(^34) See Kathy Eden,Friends Hold All Things in Common: Tradition, Intellectual Property, and
the Adages of Erasmus(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).
(^35) See Constance Furey,Erasmus, Contarini, and the Religious Republic of Letters(Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008).
(^36) Cicero,De senectute, trans. William Armistead Falconer, Loeb Classical Library, Cicero
vol. 20 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1923), 57.
184 Brett Foster