Richard H Armstrong (University of Houston)
As scholars like Heinrich Plett (2012) have shown, the ancient concept of enargeia has a long and varied history, in part because of its conflation with Aristotelian energeia (Caloboli Montefusco 2005) and allied terms for visualization and description, like phantasia and ekphrasis (Goldhill 2007). There is, perhaps, a fruitful quality to the vagueness of “vividness” as a concept, as when the author of the treatise On Style (Περὶ Ἑρμηνείας) states simply that enargeia “arises from precise narration and leaving out or cutting out nothing” (209). Thanks to its porosity and adaptability, the concept sits at the crossroads of rhetoric, poetics, the visual arts, and even philosophical epistemology. But I wish to focus on its deployment in a very precise moment and location: the invention of blank verse, which we might take for granted as a mere imitation of classical poetry. In fact, blank verse has a discrete history of its own and, interestingly, a connection to the Early Modern deployment of enargeia. I focus in particular on the work of Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478-1550), who, while certainly not the sole practitioner of blank verse epic and drama, provided the pioneering rationale for it in the Cinquecento (Steadman 1964; Hardison 1984; Roggia 2014).
Trissino is known best for his verse drama Sophonisba (1515) and his epic L’Italia liberata dai Goti (1547-48), both works produced in blank verse and early examples of compositions newly modeled on ancient exemplars and Aristotelian principles. In his dedicatory Letter to Charles V that prefaces L’Italia liberata, he makes explicit that Aristotle’s Poetics and Homeric epic are foundational to his own work, in defiance of the primacy of Horatian and Virgilian models (Musacchio 2003). Enargeia figures large in Trissino’s understanding of Homer’s poetic craft. Epic treats a continuous narrative material (materia continuata), and thus unlike lyric it requires a style that can encompass many descriptive strategies. This means a verse form must be free to reshape itself in such verse paragraphs and similes as are necessary to this end. As Trissino further states in his own Poetica, the conventional verse forms of terza rima (Dante’s epic meter) and ottava rima (then very much in vogue for the chivalric epics of Boiardo and Ariosto) all exhibit the same problem: their recurrent rhyme schemes veer the verses towards their own internal coherence through homophony and stanzaic form, artificially segmenting the poem into identical units. In this sense, we might say, rhymed meters adhere inevitably to themselves, while blank verse has the freedom to adhere to its object of description, and can thus use only those words that are essential and appropriate, not merely ones that sound alike. Hence enargeia favors “unbound verses” (versi sciolti), though they are the same hendecasyllabic line as in rhymed meters and not an imitation of the ancient hexameter, so as to produce “a sort of protracted and sustained discursivity” (Roggia 2014, 130).