Alcuin as a Poet: Rhetoric and Belief in his Latin Verse

Abstract

Much has been written in our century about the question of belief in poetry, and much about the question of rhetoric. I hope in this article to deal with both these aspects of convention (nomos) or habit: rhetoric being considered as linguistic convention or habit, and belief as a habituation of the mind. Style, which begins as a mode of persuasion or appeal to belief. eventually becomes transfixed in an exploration of linguistic habit for its own sake; but a period subjected to appreciable cultural and social change will ultimately come to look back upon this fixation of language as mannered and oppressive. To harmonize our inner and outer habituations, a readjustment of rhetoric and belief is called for. This occurred, for example, during the Romantic Revival, and many have called for it in our own time. I propose to study Alcuin, not just as a poet in his own right, but as an example of such a readjustment. In his age as in our own, language, the great conservative medium of a culture (in which all is convention and only the habitual survives) had become a problematic and challenging link with a largely alienated past.

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