Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance: A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism

This is a rigorous examination of how classical rhetorical traditions shaped English Renaissance literary criticism. Clark traces the intellectual inheritance from classical antiquity through medieval predecessors to the Elizabethan and Jacobean critics who wrestled with poetry's purpose and technique. The study illuminates a period when writers like Sidney, Jonson, and their contemporaries operated within a rhetorical framework so foundational it required no defense - a framework that understood poetry as craft, persuasion, and moral instruction intertwined. Clark's dual focus on both the general theory of rhetoric and Renaissance conceptions of poetry's purposes reveals how thoroughly classical terminology permeated critical discourse. The book remains essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the intellectual architecture beneath Renaissance poetry, and why figures like Aristotle's Poetics and Ciceronian oratory mattered desperately to the period's most sophisticated minds.