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The Problem of Latin Renaissance Poetry*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2019

Leo Spitzer*
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University
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Extract

It is a result of our modern overspecialization in scholarship that, although every one knows of the excellence of Latin Renaissance poetry and of the reputation it enjoyed in its time, this poetry is not yet studied today as it deserves. The scholar in Romance, for example, while realizing that literary figures such as Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ronsard, DuBellay were bilingual and wrote in Latin as well as in the vernacular, that DuBellay drafted his sonnet Heureux qui comme Ulysse … first in Latin, that Petrarch appreciated his Africa more than his Canzoniere, is more apt to study the Latin works of the Renaissance poets for the light they may cast on their works in the vernacular than as works of art which have their meaning in themselves.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1955

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Footnotes

*

Read at the meeting of the Columbia University Seminar on the Renaissance 19 April 1955.

References

* Read at the meeting of the Columbia University Seminar on the Renaissance 19 April 1955.