| Abstrakt: |
In the Apology for Poetry, Philip Sidney defines the word energeia as the "forcibleness" that moves a poet to produce language capable of moving an audience to a desired end, specifically virtuous action. So much is widely agreed. More difficult are questions of how Sidney's poet is to engage such force, how it may be conveyed to a reader, and whether there is evidence of Sidney employing a poetics of energeia in his own fictions. This essay addresses these questions first by considering Aristotle's use of energeia as a lexical, metaphysical, physical, and animating principle of motion and then by noting how Galen used the word to explain the physiological processes of embodied, life-giving spirits and organs. Much later, interest in the embodied soul led Philip Melanchthon to consider the divine Spirit's interaction with rational spirits in the human soul. Sidney's Apology in turn assigns a "divine breath" to the poet, as well as the embodied energeia that can move readers to virtuous action, the "ending end" of poetry. In Book 2 of the New Arcadia, Philoclea's self-narrative illustrates Sidney's use of energeia to enact the affective, pre-conscious force needed to overcome the "infected" will. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
