Conceited wit showed its character towards the end of the fifteenth century in the work of poets who made it their aim to exercise their hearers' minds with clever plays of metaphor and ingenious reasoning. What distinguishes these writers from poets who had juggled with metaphoric properties in passing – Cino da Pistoia, Petrarch himself – is that they make wit the whole end of their art. ‘Language and style count for nothing. What scores is the farfetchedness of the conceits, the unexpectedness of the inferences, the liveliness of the antitheses’. The assumptions then current about the writing of lyric poetry fostered this mode of poetic wit, and were systematised somewhat later in Giulio Camillo's elaborate projection from the Aristotelean categories.

Camillo's formulation of his system in 1544 lends force to D'Ancona's much-disputed thesis that all the elements of the seventeenth-century style of conceited wit were already present long before 1600. D'Ancona characterises these earlier modes of wit as an ‘anticipated Gongorism’. We must ask how far they anticipate Donne, and in what way the so-called ‘line of wit’ bears upon the character of metaphysical wit. Like S. L. Bethell later D'Ancona thinks that conceited wit came into Europe from Spain; and he finds it conspicuously displayed in the work of some lyric poets who enjoyed a European vogue in the early sixteenth century, notably the Spaniard Benedetto Cariteo (Gareth) and the Italians Antonio Tebaldeo and Serafino Ciminelli d'Aquila. D'Ancona himself had no taste for conceited wit.