““must be wrestled: this is no account of inspiration; it figures instead strenuous poetic labor.66 Proteus sponsors a sense of poetic form as constraint; notions of organic or expressive form are irrelevant to his legend. For only by constraint will he give answer: He bends to no entreaty; capture him With ruthless force and fetters; only these Will circumvent and shatter his designs. (Georgics 4.399–400)67 His story reveals some of what an account of poetic authority requires: struggle and labor, unstable and forceful formality, and repetitiveness; but also the merely temporary arrest of truth. Proteus is an oracle, not a figure for rhetorical artifice. One grasps him, holds on, and after his resistance is spent, he yields a truth. A grip on truth and an effort at retention, however temporary: that is what Proteus brings to a religious poetic—a stubborn, willful grasp on an elusive oracle. We speak of orphic fragments, enigmas, but not of forms fulfilled. Proteus supplements orphic poetics by sponsoring perseverance within explicit bonds: the origin of poetry, for him, is metamorphosis.””
