“When Artifice Is Knowledge,” a Lecture by Roland Greene

A thread of inquiry that joins early modern and postmodern poets is concerned with the nature and significance of artifice, or the properties that distinguish poems from other kinds of literary art, such as sound patterns, figurative language, and visual form. Readers are often surprised to discover that some demonstrations of artifice in sixteenth- or seventeenth-century poetry could pass as native to an avant-garde of the late twentieth century or vice versa.

This lecture counterposes two provocateurs of widely separated eras, the Spanish polymath Juan Caramuel de Lobkowitz (1606-82) and the American Jackson Mac Low (1922-2004), as theorists of artifice. Caramuel and Mac Low place procedural operations in the foreground of their work as they make not only poems but the machines by which poems are made. For both of them artifice becomes not a means to an end, a way of calling attention to ideas or emotions, but a dwelling place in which we learn, feel, and experience. Finally, despite their common interests, Caramuel and Mac Low represent complementary but different positions about the kinds of knowledge we obtain through artifice.

Roland Greene is a scholar and teacher of poetry and poetics from the early modern period to the present. His books include Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (2013); Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (1999); Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (1991); and the fourth edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012), for which he served as editor in chief. His new book is Apollo Barroco: Inceptions of the Baroque in Seventeenth-Century Europe and America, to appear in 2026. Since 2019 he has directed the Stanford Humanities Center, the leading university-based research institute for the humanities. He is a past President of the Modern Language Association and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

This lecture is the keynote address for "Poetry in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: A Symposium.”

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