Abstract

This dissertation explores the influence of hermetic notions of the imagination on ideas about poetry and the poetic imagination in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. The principal hypothesis is that in this period concepts of the imagination as a pneumatic power intimately related to cosmic spirits were revived for the purpose of expanding traditional views regarding poetic epistemology. The writers addressed in this thesis seem to have desired to define their poetic discourse as more than allegorical or didactic mimesis whose links to the vagaries of fancy had to be occluded. The central focus of this work is on the ways in which poetic articulations of erotic psycho-physiology provided opportunities for exploring indirectly this epistemology of the hermetic imagination. ;The first two chapters consider the ways in which pneumatic concepts of the imagination survived in the Christian Middle Ages. The first chapter examines medical opinions about spirits and faculty psychology, and the philosophical revival of Neoplatonic cosmology in the twelfth century. The second chapter argues that in the Vita Nuova Dante attempted to describe his love for Beatrice as a hermetic imaginative experience closely linked to poetic epistemology. The next chapter considers the poetry of Michelangelo in relation to the Neoplatonic revival of interest in spirits, imagination, and magic. The fourth chapter argues that Sidney's theory of poetry as mediating between history and philosophy is indebted to concepts of the imagination as a spirit that integrates body and soul. The fifth chapter examines the poetry of John Donne. His frequent references to hermeticism and to alchemy are viewed as revealing a divided attitude towards the poetic imagination. On the one hand, Donne associates hermetic epistemology with the capacity of poetry to articulate profound intuitions about the vital interconnectedness of the universe. On the other hand, he views occult beliefs as examples of how the imagination constructs unreal illusions. Finally, the last chapter suggests that poetic allusions to "musica mundana" in the works of writers such as Milton and Crashaw reflect the continuing influence of hermetic epistemology on concepts of the poetic imagination in the later seventeenth century