Abstract

For Poliziano philology opens man to the experience of the uncanniness of tropes. In the Lamia he proposes a rethinking of philology's ontological status: philology as a science and encyclopedia of tropes. Such a critical frame-of-mind informs the major poetic writings. In the Stanze, Poliziano employs the trope of metalepsis as a means of both grounding a dialectic with the past, and reinventing a literary language. The Favola di Orfeo, whose aesthetic hub is nourished by the cognitive capacity of poetic utterance, is an allegory of metaphor's ability to lead to the disclosure of the originary locus.