Creative ymaginacioun and Canon Constraints in the Fifteenth Century. James I and Charles d'Orléans

The chapter analyses notions of poetry and artistic creation in the early fifteenth century, as they are voiced in The Kingis Quair, attributed to James I of Scotland, and in the collection of English poems in various metres, now known under the collective title of Fortunes Stabilnes, attributed to Charles d’OrlŽans. Although being rather different in content and form, the two works share some important characteristics: both are of uncertain attribution, and both purport to be, to some extent, autobiographical utterances by their alleged authors — noble Lancastrian prisoners, whose adventurous lives drew the attention of contemporary and later historians. The essay especially focuses on those verse sequences in the two works where the respective narrators express their views about (their own) poetic creation. This is shown to be the result of creative imagination and/or divine inspiration — as opposed to technical elaboration and canon constraints. As to Kingis Quair, the author's explicit pronouncements on poetry can mostly be found in stanza 11: in it the narrator describes himself as being incapable of sleeping, and thus seeking comfort in Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae. His troubled thoughts are then interrupted by the sound of the bell, ringing for matins, which seems to ask him, “Tell on, man, quhat thee befell”. Thus the Christian symbol of the bell, and of the office for matins inviting Christians to renew their praise of God, is superimposed to the traditional figure of the muse or goddess or generic lady inviting the would-be sleeper to begin his dream-narration. The soul has been newly awakened by the bell; the bid to speak in a poetic voice comes from heaven. The poem itself is shown as an answer to God’s bidding, and both the pagan imagery and the courtly love topoi that can be found throughout the poem are subsumed under the wider frame of Christian symbolism. In fact, the poem is presented as the autobiography of a Christian and a poet, and reflects the experiences of both, therefore transcending previous poetic conventions and canon constraints. C.S. Lewis has correctly noted that this stanza 'anticipates' Sir Philip Sidney’s well known poetic statement in the first sonnet of Astrophil and Stella concerning the author's own inspiration: “Fool, said my Muse to me, look in thy heart, and write”. Sidney, in fact, would analogously oppose his own "heart" and creative "Invention" to "Studie" and "others' leaves".1 Interestingly enough, something similar also happens in Fortunes Stabilnes. In a verse sequence that has no correspondence with the author's French poems,2 Charles’s poetic persona, who is also the narrating voice, decides to make use of his poetic abilities in order to convince his lady about his love and thus move her (another anticipation of a Sidneyan motif) with the help of Cupid and Venus. This time, it is Hope that persuades the lover to set pen to paper, and encourages him (in tones very similar to the ones characterising the bell inThe Kingis Quair and the muse in Sidney's sonnet) to do “as [he] kanst”, leaving aside over-elaborate speech and sterile rhetorical conventions. The poet's difficulty in facing an unfamiliar language is translated into a more general difficulty in overcoming the constraints of poetic conventions. Therefore, both inThe Kingis Quair and in Fortunes Stabilnes the adoption of an autobiographical form contributes to the creation of a poetic self, and the consequent vindication of poetic — and 'political' — autonomy. Whether or not these works were actually written by the persons whose autobiographies they claim to be, they use the exceptional circumstances in the lives of their protagonists to charge the poetic word with the role of a double statement of independence, both from the shackles of prison and the constraints of literary tradition.