It is a poetry essay book. Published in 1589—just as the great Elizabethan explosion of drama and poetry was beginning — George Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie is among the finest of the poetics texts in a tradition that begins with Roman works such as Cicero's Ad C. Herennium and Quintilian's Institutes of Oratory, and includes Bede's De Arte Metrica et de Schematibus et Tropis, Geoffrey de Vinsauf's Poetria Nova, Matthew of Vendome's The Art of Versification, and Dante Alighieri's Il Convivio, among others. Like Dante's de Vulgari Eloquentia and Joachim du Bellay's Defense et Illustration de la Langue Francaise, Puttenham promotes the idea of a vernacular poetry—the idea that one's common tongue is the proper vehicle for writing, rather than Latin. The Arte of English Poesie is divided into 'three Bookes: The first of Poets and Poesie, the second of Proportion, the third of Ornament.