What Else Do Poets Want? And How Do They Get It?

This chapter foregrounds poets’ struggles to establish poetry as a service worthy of reward and how they tried to persuade patrons to fulfil their promises and perform their moral duties as wealthy and powerful members of society. The opening sets out what patrons and clients offered each other and how they were conventionally supposed to perceive their obligations to each other. The chapter then proceeds to examine in detail one of the key gifts the poet had to offer: fame. It underlines the material paradoxes of granting fame through poetry and explores the moral restrictions that were imposed on poets, who had the power to confer eternal celebrity on patrons. Poets in Portugal frequently muddied the moral ideals that were supposed to govern patronage relationships and sometimes took poetry from its position as the prize of virtue to peddle it as something like a consumer product. Poets faced a number of practical problems in the arrangement of patronage relations that often left them on the back foot while trying to win favour, but they were inventive in seeking solutions to their problems, for instance by proposing changes to the procedures of writing poetry and receiving rewards, using friends to build relationships and close patronage deals, and framing requests in particular ways to suit the interests and disposition of their chosen patron. These issues are discussed by placing poems in their historical context and by the use of a network visualization of patterns of poetic dedication (included in the Appendix) that points to the interconnectedness of the social circles of the writers discussed.

What Is a Poet?

This chapter considers what it meant to call someone a poet in sixteenth-century Portugal. Drawing on word historical and sociological methods, the chapter focuses on the word poeta (poet) as it appears in the poetry of the period. Many writers sought to articulate the specialness of the poeta and their art, making distinctions between poetas and mere versifiers or those who were dismissed as writing only frivolous or slanderous verse. In a bid to legitimize a particular kind of poetry as valuable, writers compared the work of poets with that of other professionals such as lawyers, doctors, and builders. These moments of self-justification are taken here as versions of what has become known in sociology as ‘professional legitimization talk’. Horace emerges as an important figure in these discussions for modelling in his Ars poetica a kind of professional ethos that enables writers to regulate who belonged among the ranks of poetas and who did not. Horatian guidelines become in the period less extracts of an instruction manual and more of an oath of professional conduct.

Introduction

The introduction sets out the methodological approach of this study, which combines book history and literary analysis with methods drawn from sociology, namely, network analysis, valuation studies, and the sociology of professions. It argues for a ‘pragmatics of poetry’ that takes seriously the more practical concerns that poets articulated in their verse and the inventive, and often conflicting, ways in which poets wrote about what it meant to write verse in the period. The introduction also acquaints readers unfamiliar with sixteenth-century Portuguese literature with the writers who will feature most prominently in this study. A concluding section considers how the figure of Orpheus transformed across a set of images and texts from the period concerned in order to illustrate the various issues discussed in the chapters that follow.

Why Print Poetry?

The 1590s saw what has come to be known as the ‘lyric’ poetry of many of the writers in this book printed for the first time. This chapter investigates the rush of activity in Lisbon’s print houses as the century came to a close, focusing especially on why the many individuals involved in the print trade chose to print poems that had been circulating, sometimes widely, in manuscript for quite some time. It sets out a distaste for love poetry that was frequently articulated in Inquisitorial printing licences and in the paratexts to other books printed in the period, before tracing how the terms of approval for non-devotional poetry began to shift towards the end of the sixteenth century. Three principal justifications for printing collections of poetry were presented in the period. The first involved using print to disseminate a vision of the best of the Portuguese language, simultaneously to those outside the nation, who doubt its capacity as a vehicle for ideas, and to native speakers of the language, who might learn from its most able and elegant practitioners, i.e. poets. The second reason relates more closely to the change in medium in question: editors and printers argued that print was a means of tackling the errors introduced by manuscript dissemination. The third and final justification was the desire to make a name for a poet, which ties in closely with the other justifications for print, because establishing an individual’s renown required settling their oeuvre and often involved claiming them as a national icon.

Afterword

With reference to an emblem by Andrea Alciato, the afterword draws out the tensions between poets’ aspirations (both poetic and social) in the period and the practical constraints that weighed them down which lie at the heart of the preceding chapters. It returns to the idea of a ‘pragmatics of poetry’ that was set out in the introduction, restating the aim of this study to consider the practicalities around making poetry (finding time to write it, making a living from it, printing books of it) and the different contexts in which poetry was written, copied, gifted, swapped, and sold, in order to grasp what poets thought the value of their art was or ought to be.

What Do Poets Want to Write?

This chapter explores the careers of sixteenth-century Portuguese poets as articulated by themselves and their contemporaries. It draws on scholarly work in the developing field of career criticism to consider moments when poets discussed what they had written and what they one day hoped to produce. For all that writers wrote a lot about what they had achieved or wanted to achieve, this chapter shows that their careers rarely proceeded in a purely linear fashion as was claimed for some ancient authors, such as Virgil. The chapter suggests that when we refuse the lure of hindsight or look beyond the ways that writers tried to iron out their own careers, we see that lots of anxiety attended moments of career reflexivity, that choices of genre were determined by a mixture of personal, economic, political, and social motivations and, moreover, that writers would foreground different motivations when writing in different contexts or addressing different individuals.