Poetry and Truth from the Italian Renaissance to Milton

Does literature participate in the quest for truth and knowledge? Is it distinguished from other disciplines merely by being fictional? My dissertation attempts to answer these questions by studying the evolution of early modern literary theory and epic, from fifteenth-century Italian pedagogies, sixteenth-century treatises on poetry (Tasso, Mazzoni, Sidney) and commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics (Castelvetro), to epics such as those by Tasso and Milton, in order to study the conception of poetry as a source of truth and knowledge, as an artistic creation that is not merely fictional or recreational. Previous Italian scholarship has focused on the question of the relationship between truth and poetry only within Italy, while English critics have studied the influence of Italian culture on Milton in terms of style, literary conventions, and politics. I fill this gap and propose that Milton fulfils the search for a satisfying connection between poetry and truth, and that only by considering this transnational trajectory is it possible to assess the concept of poetic truth’s full potential in the Italian Renaissance and Milton’s innovations on this topic. I show that during this time period the contradictions pervading early modern attempts to define poetry’s cognitive value are gradually surpassed, and poetry gains a new position in regard to its relationship with truth. Poetry is no longer a discipline that, as with most Renaissance poetics, is a primitive philosophy, a way of sugarcoating and simplifying difficult truths, an obscure and esoteric knowledge, a repertoire of moral or devotional examples, or a repository of notions taken from other disciplines. Instead, poetry articulates truth by placing it in relation with human frailty, doubt, will, and passion, without being obscure or allegorical, hagiographical, rhetorical persuasion, or encyclopedic. Poetry inscribes knowledge in a human and individual sphere, which is not a simplified version of science or philosophy, but a perspective that no other discipline can offer