The Model of Poesy

[4] The treatise of The Model of Poesy (1599) is in three sections;[5] in the first section, Scott defines poetry and makes clear his debts to earlier theorists: All antiquity, following their great leader Aristotle, have defined poetry to be an art of imitation, or an instrument of reason, that consists in laying down the rules and way how in style to feign or represent things, with delight to teach to move us to good; as if one should say with the lyric Simonides (after whom Sir Philip Sidney saith) the poem is a speaking or wordish picture.

[6]Scott then discusses the genus (matter), difference (form), and end (purpose) of poetry, dealing with creative questions such as the source of poetic inspiration and the temperament required of the poet.

[7]William Scott's knowledge of Classical literature included works by Aristotle (the Organon and the Nicomachean Ethics), Horace (Ars Poetica), Quintilian, Cicero, and Plutarch (Parallel Lives),[8] and contemporary works by the scholar Julius Caesar Scaliger (Poetices libri septem), Giovanni Antonio Viperano (De poeti libri tres), Baldassare Castiglione (Il Libro del Cortegiano), and Gian Paolo Lomazzo (Trattato dell'arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura).

"[10] Scott also knew the contemporary poetry of his time, such as the Rape of Lucrece, by Shakespeare, which he twice quotes, and alludes to the garden scene in Richard II;[11] he knew the Latin plays Gorboduc and The Mirror for Magistrates, by George Buchanan; Troilus and Criseyde, by Geoffrey Chaucer; The Civil Wars, by Samuel Daniel; Englands Heroical Epistles, by Michael Drayton; the Shepheardes Calendar, the View of the Present State of Ireland, and the Faerie Queene, by Edmund Spenser; Saint Peter’s Complaint, by Robert Southwell, the works of Sir Thomas Wyatt;[12] and the works of the Italian poets Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, and Giovanni Batista Guarini.

[13] His English translations of the first two days of La Sepmaine, by Du Bartas, are linked to The Model of Poesy as a demonstration of Scott's literary theories (several times quoted in the treatise) and a text with similar words, imagery, and ideas.

[17] The dedicatory letter to Sir Henry Lee introduces Scott's treatise of poetics, and he describes The Modell of Poesye as ‘the first fruits of my study.’ Folios 51–76 contain a partial translation of the first two days of La Sepmaine (1578), by Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas.