Decorum - in Rhetoric and Poetry

In Rhetoric and Poetry

In classical rhetoric and poetic theory, decorum designates the appropriateness of style to subject. Both Aristotle (in, for example, his Poetics) and Horace (in his Ars Poetica) discussed the importance of appropriate style in epic, tragedy, comedy, etc. Horace says, for example: "A comic subject is not susceptible of treatment in a tragic style, and similarly the banquet of Thyestes cannot be fitly described in the strains of everyday life or in those that approach the tone of comedy. Let each of these styles be kept to the role properly allotted to it."

Hellenistic and Latin rhetors divided style into: the grand style, the middle style and the low (or plain) style; certain types of vocabulary and diction were considered appropriate for each stylistic level. A discussion of this division of styles was set out in the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium. Modeled on Virgil's three-part literary career (Bucolics, Georgics, Aeneid), ancient, medieval and Renaissance theorists often linked each style to a specific genre: epic (high style), didactic (middle style) and pastoral (plain style). In the Middle Ages, this concept was called "Virgil's wheel". For stylistic purists, the mixing of styles within a work was considered inappropriate, and a consistent use of the high style was mandated for the epic. However, stylistic diversity had been a hallmark of classical epic (as seen in the inclusion of comic and/or erotic scenes in the epics of Virgil or Homer). Poetry, perhaps more than any other literary form, usually expressed words or phrases that were not current in ordinary conversation, characterized as poetic diction.

With the arrival of Christianity, concepts of decorum became involved with those of the sacred and profane in a different way from in the previous classical religions. Although in the Middle Ages religious subjects were often treated with broad humour in a "low" manner, especially in medieval drama, the churches policed carefully the treatment in more permanent art forms, insisting on a consistent "high style". By the Renaissance the mixture of revived classical mythology and Christian subjects was also considered to fall under the heading of decorum, as was the increasing habit of mixing religious subjects in art with lively genre painting or portraiture of the fashionable. The Catholic Council of Trent specifically forbade, among other things, the "indecorous" in religious art.

Concepts of decorum, increasingly sensed as inhibitive and stultifying, were aggressively attacked and deconstructed by writers of the Modernist movement, with the result that readers' expectations were no longer based on decorum, and in consequence the violations of decorum that underlie the wit of mock-heroic, of literary burlesque, and even a sense of bathos, were dulled in the twentieth-century reader.