Renaissance Lyric Poetry

In the composition of his poetry, John Donne subverted the traditional rhetorical conventions which dictated the order of presentation of textual contents in both literary and non-literary discourse. Much of Donne's poetry is based on the organisation of a topic or argument by ...

Much information about, and even the canon of Mikołaj Sęp Szarzyński’s works (? – 1580) still remain probable but not fully ascertained. The little book published twenty years after his death, Rytmy, a single copy of which survives – it was found accidentally in the early 1800s – represents his uncertain legacy. Yet not only Sęp is the greatest pre-modern Polish poet after Kochanowski, but, due to his sonnets and other compositions of his early maturity, he can be considered the creator of a new style that, under the influence of late Italian Petrarchism, brings Polish poetry closer to mannerism and, for some commentators, to baroque. This essay focuses in particular on sonnet 3, "To the Most Holy Virgin ". While revealing many connections with Dante and Petrarca, it takes on themes and styles of the Spanish Marian literature that was almost contemporary with the young author. This poem constitutes the cornerstone of a sonnet cycle (the first in Polish literature) that marks the artistic culmination of a “passage” to modernity, in which an attitude of doubt and the attendant "grammar of uncertainty" (J. Błoński) become the writer’s main stylistic and existential signature.

The love poetry written in England from roughly 1500 to roughly 1660 is some of the most important verse in the English language. This is true for various reasons. First, love was an immensely popular topic in many different kinds of literature from this period. (See, for instance, Shakespeare's plays.) Therefore, what is written about love in, say, Renaissance drama often reflects many of the same ideas dealt with in the poetry of the time. Secondly, the love poetry of this era was immensely and demonstrably popular during the period itself. Renaissance poets enjoyed writing about love, and they enjoyed imitating and responding to each other's writings about this topic. This popularity of love as a theme, both among readers and writers from this era, can tell us a great deal about the values and mores of the entire English Renaissance. Moreover, Renaissance love poetry has remained widely read in the centuries since it was first produced. Arguably no other time or place in the history of writing about love, at least in the English language, produced so much or such memorable verse concerning erotic feelings and attitudes. Finally, because of its enduring popularity, Renaissance love poetry helped influence the ways subsequent readers and writers of literature in English have thought about the subject of amorous desire. Often, I would argue, Renaissance love poetry tends to be misread and misunderstood because of a few basic mistakes that modern readers frequently make. First, they sometimes assume that the writer of the poem and the speaker of the poem are identical. They assume that Renaissance love poets were inevitably using their poems to articulate their own personal attitudes in very blatant and simple ways: If the speaker of a poem says A, then the writer of the poem must also accept A. If the speaker of a poem says B, then the writer of the poem must also agree with what the speaker has just said about B. But this is not always the case. Secondly, I believe that we often miss much of the sheer comedy of Renaissance love poetry. We often take quite seriously what seems to have been meant in jest; we often impute to the poets the foolish, comic views of the poems' speakers. In short, we frequently miss the sheer hilarious irony of many Renaissance love poems-irony that makes the poems seem funny on one level but intriguingly serious on another. It is the irony of so many Renaissance love poems (I would argue) that gives them their real moral depth. By implicitly mocking the self-centered desires of so many of the poems' speakers, the writers of the poems implicitly endorse the Christian morality that was taken so seriously at the time. Most writers of Renaissance love poetry were demonstrably serious and committed Christians. They often wrote openly religious verse and prose even while also writing "love" poetry that can frequently seem irreligious unless it is read ironically. Understanding the irony of much of the love poetry, I suggest, is the key to understanding how so many sincerely committed Christians could write poetry that seems erotically frivolous. They were, in a phrase, teaching through ridicule-making serious moral points by using comic, implicitly satirical methods. 1

One of the most intriguing studies of John Donne's poetry ever published was a book issued in 1967 by N. J. C. Andreasen. Titled John Donne: Conservative Revolutionary, this work argued that Donne was in his morality a conservative Christian but a revolutionary in his style of writing. Andreasen's approach helps to make Donne's career as a writer seem far more consistent, and far less confusing, than it can seem from the perspective of other points of view. How, readers of Donne often ask, could the writer of some of the most powerful religious poems in the English language also write poems that sometimes verge on pornography? How could he celebrate ideal Christian love in some poems and then express bold, bodily, merely physical eroticism in others? How could he write some poems in which women are treated with enormous respect and admiration and then also write other poems in which women seem to be sexually objectified, sometimes in very crude terms? Answers to these questions have been various. Some critics have argued that the Donne who wrote poems stressing mere physical appetite was the youthful Donne ("Jack Donne"), while the Donne who wrote poems celebrating genuine married love and mutual spiritual devotion was an older Donne, a more mature and spiritually committed individual. The problem with this response is that Donne wrote one of his most impassioned and philosophically serious defenses of Christianity and Christian morals ("Satire III") during the very same period when he was writing some of his most obviously explicit "pagan" poems. Another way of explaining Donne's apparent inconsistency is to assume that he wrote some poems with one audience in mind (for instance, an audience of randy young men) and other poems for a different, more deeply religious readership. But it would have been hard to keep these two kinds of audiences from finding out about one another and about the kinds of poems supposedly written only for each of them. Of course, there are other possible explanations as well, including these: (1) Donne was a hypocrite; (2) Donne was somewhat schizophrenic; (3) Donne never intended or claimed to be consistent; (4) Donne, as a talented poet and sophisticated thinker, was exploring and expressing a whole range of possible thoughts and feelings and felt no need to make them all conform to one another. Still, it is difficult to read "Satire III" and then turn, say, to the famously erotic (possibly pornographic) poem titled "To His Mistress Going to Bed" and try to understand how the same person could have written both poems, especially during roughly the same period of time. "Satire III" expresses deep and obvious commitment to the pursuit of spiritual truth; "To his Mistress" is full of jokes about male arousal, fantasies about sexual conquest, and a quite explicit focus mostly on one part of a woman's body, a part that the speaker says he wants to view as freely as a midwife might. The speaker's main interest is vigorous sexual activity, not deep spiritual union. Andreasen's book suggests various ways to make sense of this and other apparent contradictions in Donne's writing and thought. Essentially, Andreasen sees them not as contradictions at all. Instead, she thinks that in some poems (such as the Holy Sonnets and the obviously spiritual love poems), Donne was endorsing Christian morality in fairly explicit ways. And she thinks that in other poems-poems in which speakers seem to focus on merely physical eroticism-he was promoting Christian morality through the use of irony. Such irony, she thinks, would have been obvious to many Christian readers of his day. Donne, Andreasen suggests, often goes out of his way to include clues that the speakers of his blatantly erotic poems should not be taken seriously. In other words, Donne sometimes created speakers who, because of their almost exclusive focus on mere physical eroticism, would have been recognized as fools by sophisticated readers. He usually gives these

For an audio-video animation of the manuscript with the modern transcription see the link below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dO56v7qltNo

An edition of the anonymous labyrinthine ballade on three canons, "En la maison Dedalus" (In the House of Dedalus) from the Berkeley Manuscript.

This edition includes a modern transcription of the music, the original manuscript excerpted, poetic and literal translations of the text, reconstruction of the 11-tier labyrinth upon which the music is overlain, and pedagogical materials/explanations of the musical and poetic medieval Ballade forme-fixe.

Focused on two sixteenth-century editions of a medieval Valencian author (Ausiàs March, 1400-59), this book examines how the material transformations of early modern poetic texts at different stages in their publication process—from the making of the printer’s copy and the translation of the text, to the typesetting and editing of the book in the printing shop—entailed thorough changes in the meaning of a lyric corpus.

Ruins were everywhere in the Renaissance. The scattered remains of the ancient past inspired humanists to think about the vast distance between themselves and antiquity. This study argues that the meditation on ruins was central to two conjoined impulses in the Renaissance: the recovery of the ancient and the creation of the new. As artists used the old to fashion the new, the ruin was the most visible sign of creative destruction. The first full-length book to document the early modern cult of the fragment, The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature argues that Renaissance humanists loved ruins because they represented the pastness of the past in a residual form. This historical consciousness propelled them into creating poetry that was self-aware of its absorption of the past and its own survival in the future. Whereas conventional literary narrative associates ruins with the Romantic ideas of melancholy and obsolescence, my work posits that the Renaissance was a ruin-naissance, the birth of ruins as objects of contemplation in which they became powerful mementos of textual recovery, cultural renewal, and ethical reflection.

Renaissance funeral elegy had two primary functions: to remember the dead, and to console the living. As a work of persuasion (of the bereaved not to grieve, or of the reader to admire the dead), it drew on classical rhetoric for guidance in the gathering and disposition of materials and their effective delivery. But as a social action-an intervention at the scene of death-determined by its occasion, it can also be read according to contemporary formalist and poststructuralist theories of genre (Miller 1984). Todorov argues that "it is because genres exist as an institution that they function as 'horizons of expectation' for readers, and as "models of writing" for authors" (Todorov 1976, 163). This essay will examine the interaction between elegy and other theological and social institutions which organized death. As an institution, elegy conforms strongly to traditions and reader expectations; but this implies a rigidity which is belied by elegists' radical disruptions of expectations in the pursuit of individual distinction: a practice which is itself generic. So for example, elegies proclaim the obvious truths that death is universal and inevitable, or that the deceased exemplifies all the expected virtues: death is always the same. But they also commend the dead person's particularity, converting the duty to memorialize into an outburst of free admiration: this death, like this poem, is different.

volumi:
"Antonio Barolini. Cronistoria di un’anima", Atti dei Convegni di Vicenza e di New York nel centenario della nascita, a cura di Teodolinda Barolini. Firenze, Sef Editrice, 2015.

Mario Moroni, Recitare le ceneri, prefazione di Carlo Alberto Sitta, Firenze: Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2015

Marco Sonzogni, Ci vuole un fiore, prefazione di Gabriella Sica, Firenze: Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2014

Alberto Bertoni, Traversate, Preface by Paolo Valesio, Firenze: Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2014

Patrizia Santi, Frammenti periferici, Preface by Alberto Bertoni, Firenze: Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2013

Leopoldo Maria Panero-Ianus Pravo, Senz’arma che dia carne all’imperium, Preface by Andrea Ponso, Firenze: Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2011

Vera Lúcia de Oliveira, La carne quando è sola, Preface by Alessio Brandolini, Firenze: Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2011

Emma Pretti, I giorni chiamati nemici, Firenze: Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2010.

Nella prima parte, l'articolo offre alcune riflessioni sui modi con cui Ariosto, nelle sue Rime, fa interagire modello petrarchista e modello classico, con particolare riferimento al rapporto amore-ragione, al ruolo della «fede» amorosa, alla rappresentazione di Amore e della donna amata, alla componente sensuale. L'autore si sofferma fra l'altro su un'interessante riscrittura del capitolo ariostesco della notte d'amore, ad opera del poeta udinese Pietro Arrigoni (ca. 1525-1571). La seconda e la terza parte del contributo analizzano come Ariosto riprende il sistema concettuale e topico del codice petrarchista, enfatizzandone significativamente certe potenzialità piuttosto che altre o instillando nuova linfa espressiva in topoi ormai abusati. Nell'articolo è costante il confronto con la codificazione della teoria amorosa rinvenibile nella trattatistica cinquecentesca.


In the first part, the article offers some observations on how Ariosto, in his Poems, makes the classical model interact with the petrarchist model, with special reference to the relationship love-reason, the role of «faith» in love, the representation of Love and of the beloved woman, the sensual component. Among other things, the author dwells upon an interesting rewriting of the Capitolo of the love night, by the udinese poet Pietro Arrigoni (ca. 1525-1571). The second and the third part of the article analyze how Ariosto develops the conceptual and topical system of the petrarchist code, by stressing some potentialities instead of other ones or by instilling some new expressive lifeblood into hackneyed topoi. In the article, there are frequent comparisons with the love theory codification in the Renaissance treatises.

Die Frage, auf die dieses Buch eine Antwort zu geben versucht, lautet: Was weiß die Lyrik? Die Frage richtet sich an die europäische Tradition, soweit sie dafür in Betracht kommt, also an die Neuerfindung der Poesie in der Renaissance und die prägnanten Momente im achtzehnten und zwanzigsten Jahrhundert, in denen das Projekt der Dichtung als einer eigenen Wissensinstanz im analytischen Zusammenspiel mit den Wissensmodellen der Zeit wieder aufgenommen und weiter getrieben wurde. Die Untersuchungen zu Celtis, Shaftesbury, Klopstock und Valéry (mit einem kurzen Ausblick auf Stefan George) haben modellhaften Charakter, sie gelten den Grundvorstellungen, die in Werk und Theorie der genannten Autoren ihre Stunde hatten.

When Lady Mary Wroth published her sonnet sequence, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621), in the early seventeenth century, Europe was caught up in the midst of religious turmoil, not only between Catholics and Protestants, but also between followers of Luther and Calvin whose debates between revealed and rationalized belief played out in pamphlets, sermons, tracts, and political verse. Like other works during this period, Wroth’s sonnets and the images she employs engage with and comment on major issues in Jacobean culture and discourse. Madeline Bassnett suggests that the lover’s complaint in the sequence “exists alongside a Protestant narrative that records the stages and struggles of the elect individual” and asserts that this politically charged religious discourse gives reason to the style adopted in the sequence: “The charting of Pamphilia’s progress from repentance to sanctification unapologetically links Wroth with other militant Protests, who, by 1621, vociferously opposed the political and religious policies of James I.”  Bassnett sees this narrative played out in Wroth’s use of “easily recognized – and, by 1621, politicized – Calvinist terminology.” While Bassnett’s study focuses on the language of Wroth’s 78th sonnet, I assert that Wroth’s use and adaptation of common, Petrarchan imagery reflects that cultural discourse throughout the sequence. Through an examination of Wroth’s use of common Petrarchan motifs such as love figured as a light, sun, or stars, I will look to the way her work participates and responds to the religious discourse in the politically charged atmosphere of the seventeenth century. By comparing her language to that found in sermons and other religious texts as well as with her contemporary sonneteers and her predecessors working in the Petrarchan tradition, I will seek to discover and analyze her participation in religious discourse and, in particular, her adaptation of the Petrarchan lover’s language to suit her place and time.

Nei decenni iniziali del Cinquecento, prima nella poesia latina e poi in quella volgare, il "lusus pastoralis" si afferma configurandosi come un genere libero da obblighi allegorici, quindi volutamente semplice, ma carico di potenziali valenze metapoetiche: ibrido originato dall’intersezione tra ecloga ed epigramma, esso dà luogo a un punto di contatto fra la tradizione poetica greco-latina e quella volgare che non sarà privo di risvolti polemici. Come per il genere cui appartiene, quello polimorfo della pastorale, da cui trae gli essenziali elementi figurativi e finzionali, l’impiego o il rifiuto del lusus rivelano una presa di posizione sul valore e sulle finalità della poesia e del poeta, sul rapporto che sussiste fra "res" e "verba", fra letteratura e verità. A tale presa di posizione se ne affiancano, soprattutto nell’ambito della lirica volgare, altre di ordine storico-letterario – l’esigenza di rinnovamento del modello petrarchesco – e retorico – l’opposizione stilistica fra gravitas e suavitas – che segnano confini precisi all’interno dei territori, spesso indistinti, della lirica cinquecentesca. Tramite trattazioni monografiche e analisi per lo più in ottica macrotestuale, mettendo in dialogo teoria e prassi, il libro cerca quindi di comprendere il significato del lusus nell’opera degli autori presi in esame e la funzione che, nel rapporto fra le parti e il tutto, singoli testi o più estese sequenze pastorali svolgono in alcune sillogi della prima metà del Cinquecento.

L’articolo prende in esame alcune liriche di Michelangelo che hanno posto diversi problemi esegetici ai commentatori. Vengono offerte nuove proposte interpretative per i seguenti componimenti (in base alla numerazione dell’edizione Girardi): nn. 103, 104, 112, 117, 129, 298. Vengono presentati anche nuovi elementi di riflessione in relazione allo schema metrico del madrigale n. 112, tenendo conto che si tratta del testo di apertura del cosiddetto “canzoniere” di Michelangelo.

The article analyzes some of Michelangelo’s poems which posed several exegetic problems to the editors. New interpretative proposals are offered for the following texts (according the numbering in the Girardi’s edition): nn. 103, 104, 112, 117, 129, 298. Some new considerations are presented about the metrical scheme of the madrigal n. 112, by taking into account that it is the opening text of the so-called Michelangelo’s “canzoniere”.

The scholars at the Aragonese court of Naples created a new geographical image of the city and its territory, that celebrated the Neapolitan kingdoms' glory and justified the Aragonese power according to the contemporary hu-manistic cultural parameters. In particular, Iohannes Pontanus with his poe try became the author of a new myth of Naples: he celebrated the greatness and beauty of its landscape, following in classical authors' footsteps. The humanists had attributed an elevated stature to Greek places and enlightened Greek mythical, cultural, and intellectual traditions. Pontanus performed the same cultural operation with Naples and its traditions. So, the new myth of Naples was born as a new Greece, from the shores of which the image of Aragonese greatness and magnificence was spread throughout Eu-rope in light of the wisdom tradition of the ancient Gulf of the Sirens. The image of this new Arcadia, even after the end of the Aragonese kingdom of Naples, has influenced European culture over the centuries up to our times. Because men need to recognize themselves in positive and constructive ideals, intellectuals should now more than ever commit themselves to creating myths of this kind, which can be widely shared in the construction of new ideals to contribute to the cohesion of modern Europe. La creazione dell'immagine letteraria dell'Arcadia si può certo ascrivere al novero dei miti identitari di maggior successo fra gli intellettuali dell'Europa moderna. Tale mito ha rappresentato per lungo tempo un vero e proprio spa-zio dell'anima, nel quale non solo i dotti, che lo creavano o lo rigeneravano, ma anche le persone comuni, che ne fruivano, hanno riconosciuto e ritrovato la possibilità di una fuga ideale al di fuori delle categorie dello spazio e del tempo. In questo luogo ideale abitato da divinità e pastori, pieno di luce e bellezza, gli uomini hanno a lungo proiettato sia la comune aspirazione verso la pace e la giustizia, sia il culto personale del bene e del bello. Nel presente contributo vorrei trattare delle origini di questo mito dell'Europa moderna, che sembra affondare le sue radici, a mio parere, in una precisa coscienza pro-ATENE E ROMA ANNO 2018, NUOVA SERIE SECONDA, XII-FASC.3-4

En este trabajo se estudia la recepción áurea de los poemas que funcionaron como prólogo en los manuscritos y las ediciones antiguas de la poesía de Ausiàs March: “Així com cell qui ’n lo somni•s delita” (I) y “Qui no és trist, de mos dictats no cur” (XXXIX). Se argumenta que el poema I, a pesar de los elementos más puramente petrarquistas que lo conforman (moralización, retrospectiva, palinodia), sirvió de modelo proemial en contadas ocasiones, a diferencia de XXXIX, cuyos resortes retóricos (apóstrofe al lector, selección de un público cómplice) resultaban menos petrarquistas que clasicistas .

"In the early sixteenth century, the Altissimo was one of the major Italian oral poets: a laureate cantastorie singing his ‘improvised’ lyrical and narrative poems in Florence and in Venice, and publishing them in printed editions which often present their texts as live transcriptions of his performances. By analysing these editions (including a newly discovered booklet – his earliest known edition), this essay aims to investigate the Altissimo’s techniques of oral composition, his catalogue of subjects and styles, his sources and models, and the relations between the oral performance and the written transmission of his poetry.
The essay also highlights the striking similarities that the Altissimo’s complex and multifaceted profile – which blended literature and music, fine arts and eclectic learning, performing skills and commercial enterprise, genius and craftsmanship – shares with figures such as Leonardo da Vinci, Pietro Aretino, Niccolò degli Agostini, and Niccolò Zoppino. The canonical perception of each of them as an artist, a writer, or a publisher is reassessed in the light of the clues that reveal their activity as oral performers, thus showing how pivotal and permeating oral poetry was in early modern Italian culture."

This article takes as its point of departure what Bataille calls the “nauseating banality” that flowers are both symbolic of everlasting love and comically short-lived. The comparison of women to flowers in early modern lyric, already by the sixteenth century veering into the territory of cliché, often explicitly thematized—rather than trying to gloss over—the proximity of flowering to withering, a proximity highlighted by the French equivalents of those words, fleuri and flétri. In both Petrarchan and carpe diem traditions, female figures were both essential and essentially expendable. Even the most conventional love poems failed to stay on this side of garbage, as wispy images of women became disfigured into decaying organic material in the space of a single sonnet. Focusing on poems by Pierre de Ronsard and Robert Herrick, I show how these very different poets were engaged in the same misogynist cultural project, a project that takes as a premise that the smooth transition of women from vibrant matter to rotting trash is remarkable in its unremarkableness. These poets, I argue, approached the woman-flower trope with a desire and disdain comparable to their sentiments for the women their poems represented. Viewing women as neither invitingly immediate nor ethereally inaccessible, treating their bodies as dead weight or garbage rather than as property of any value, these poets used the timeless ephemerality of both women and cliché to negotiate their own ambivalence to poetry and immortality.

Sono editi e commentati tre componimenti lirici del poeta friulano Erasmo da Valvasone (ca. 1528-1593), scoperti dall'autore dell'articolo in manoscritti conservati a Udine e a Venezia. Tali testi non compaiono nell'edizione critica delle rime del Valvasone a cura di G. Cerboni Baiardi (1993). Le prime due liriche offrono vari motivi di interesse. La prima, in lode dell'avvocato e poeta Cornelio Frangipane, amico del Valvasone, conferma il fondamentale ruolo di guida del Frangipane all'interno dell'ambiente nobiliare e intellettuale friulano dell'epoca. Inoltre, il particolare uso della comparatio mitologica, tratto tipico del Valvasone, è una nuova testimonianza del gusto classicista della lirica valvasoniana, per la quale non si trovano adeguati termini di confronto nella coeva rimeria friulana in volgare: sembra rimandare piuttosto al gusto classicistico che Dionigi Atanagi (il quale fu una sorta di 'maestro' per il Valvasone) aveva maturato nell'ambiente letterario romano del Tolomei e del Guidiccioni e che, una volta trasferitosi a Venezia, cercava di diffondere tramite proposte antologiche (fra gli autori da lui antologizzati, vi è lo stesso Valvasone). Il secondo componimento edito è una sorta di testamento poetico, scritto poco prima della morte, ed è interessante perché aiuta a correggere in parte la vulgata critica di un Valvasone perennemente isolato, lontano dagli ambienti letterari che contavano. In realtà, come dimostra anche il testo proposto, perlomeno negli ultimi anni di vita il Valvasone sembra aver superato l'impasse in cui si dibatteva grazie al successo ottenuto dall'Angeleida e dalla Caccia, nonché ai rapporti stretti con l'ambiente veneziano degli accademici Uranici e con l'ambiente lombardo, in particolare la cerchia gravitante attorno all'editore bergamasco Comin Ventura. Nell'ultima parte dell'articolo, vengono segnalate alcune testimonianze manoscritte e a stampa che mancano nell'edizione di Cerboni Baiardi e nell'annessa bibliografia valvasoniana di Del Zotto. Tali segnalazioni permettono anche di aggiungere ulteriori informazioni sulla biografia culturale del Valvasone e sulla sua rete di contatti.

A study for obtaining Master Degree in Modern Greek Philology (Saint Petersburg State University, 2018) is focused on stylistic peculiarities of the 16th century anonymous lyric poetry of Cyprus also known as "The Rhymes of Love" or "Cypriot Canzoniere". The third chapter of the study also touches on some philosophical issues derived from contemporary reading of this very special example of the Renaissance poetry.

This introduction to my first book, based on my Cambridge dissertation, sets out a new approach to Quevedo's love poetry. Contesting the then dominant reading of the poems as modern and autobiographical, the book presents the work as very much of its time, as suggested by the engraving of Quevedo on Parnassus which illustrated a first edition. The approach is two fold: literary theory (here rhetoric, logic, poetics, and wit) and allusion (here to Latin elegy and Italian love lyric, especially Giambattista Marino). Thanks to Carlos Malache Silva for the scan.