This article concerns the potential of figurative meaning in heroic poems as well as the links between epic mimesis and allegorical interpretation. It also deals with an early modern idea of a literary masterpiece and its standards. As an outstanding work, a poem should be attractive for both trained and less advanced readers, those who are capable to grasp intellectually each level of the text, and those who simply want to enjoy poetry as a source of pleasure and otium. The analysis of Alegoria del poema by Torquato Tasso and De perfecta poesi by Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski proves that in the early modern period the idea of figurative meaning of epic poems was still widely recognized. This multidimensional semantic structure, conceptualized by writers and critics, combines both didactic and the ‘pleasure-giving’ aspect of a poem as well as makes the epic plot a vivid actualization of moral beauty, and thus influences a reader in a long-lasting way typical of poetry and art. An allegorical interpretation, built over a structure of a heroic fable, unites the sensual beauty of things with an intellectual experience of the great order of the world. It also adds universal qualities to the mimesis of a poem and opens it up to a cognitive and ethical perspective. The process of intense reading, although described in academic terms in Renaissance and Baroque literary criticism, is initiated in a reader’s mind, as (s)he gets exposed to poetic beauty by the very nature of poesis perfecta.
The Polish version of the article was published in “Roczniki Humanistyczne,” vol. 56 (2008), issue 1. The paper is a hidden polemic with the texts that have recently been published (not quoted by their names or indicated in the footnotes). These texts have brought forth a diagnosis that there is a delay in terms of methodology with regard to the studies on Old-Polish literature and have postulated their application to the studies on ancient literature. The author formulates her belief that traditional philology is indispensable in the studies on Old-Polish literature with an awareness that there should be a free choice in selecting the method of its interpretation. The text emerges from a protest against the rhetoric of methodological directives formulated under the influence of fashion, ideology, or fatigue with the object of research and from radical distrust to methodological directives as such, and the majority of directives in general.