Allegory between Baroque, Romanticism and Modernism: Theoretical Aspects (the Case of M.K. Sarbiewski (1596-1645))

In his treatise “De acuto et arguto” (1626) influenced by Aristotle, Polish poet and literary theorist M.C. Sarbiewski, analyzed poetry as a peculiar kind of knowledge which reveals the hidden truth behind the appearances of things. Poetry is the most fruitful strategy for the elaboration and ordering of knowledge, because it alone can bring together the traits which seem contradictory and inconsistent in reality, but which are able to coexist in the artificial body of the poem, and so in this collision to seize the whole subject, suddenly revealed from all sides. In presenting poetry as a melancholy revelation of the evasive and fluid verity of a tragically deceitful world, and in the preference for metaphorical language and poetical images over abstract schemes and formulas, Sarbiewski’s theory finds an echo in the role assigned to rhetoric in Baroque culture. This makes “De acuto et arguto” very interesting for the ordering knowledge issue, since it paradoxically derived knowledge from disorder and transgression. For R. Lachmann, the main principle of Sarbiewski`s ideal poetry-knowledge is “the rule of breaking rules”. The history of Sarbiewski’s reception continues to the Romantic period, when his poems were translated into English by S.T. Coleridge. The similarity of these two cultures, consisting in the interconnection between poetry and knowledge, have been frequently problematized and, in particular, have taken an important place in the theories of Benjamin and Deleuze. Consequently, the English translations of Sarbiewski give a promising opportunity to study poetry as a way of ordering knowledge in both Baroque and Romantic settings, and to develop the 20th century’s theories of allegorical and poetical knowledge. I will thus use Benjamin and Deleuze’s concepts of allegory, symbol, image and imagination as the tools of “poetical” knowledge ordering as the theoretical basis upon which to compare the reception of Sarbiewski’s texts in the Baroque and Romantic periods.