Lyric poetry

Anthony Oldcorn

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521434928.014

13 - Lyric poetry

from The Cinquecento

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

Anthony Oldcorn

Edited by

Peter Brand and

Lino Pertile

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Peter Brand: Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Lino Pertile: Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts

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Summary

‘Classicism’ and “anti-classicism’

The battle between the Tassisti and the Ariostisti over the epic does not have an obvious parallel in the case of lyric poetry, a genre about which the surviving fragment of Aristotle's Poetics is silent. ‘Classicists’ and ‘anti-classicists’ did on occasion exchange blows, but their opposition to one another should not obscure the fact that both – with the possible exception, among the latter, of iconoclast Pietro Aretino – are united in their devotion to antique precedent. Moreover, in spite of increasing literary specialisation, genres were still not airtight exclusive compartments; there was some give and take. We shall not be surprised to find poets who were predominantly ‘classicists’ engaging in ‘anti-classicist’ activities, or vice versa.

It is also remarkable, given the variously erotic subject-matter, how many of the poets we shall encounter, in both camps, were ecclesiastics. At first sight, to some modern eyes, an operation like that of Gerolamo Malipiero (1470s–1547), who in his popular Petrarca spirituale (1536) rewrote Petrarch's poems, systematically expunging any reference to profane love, might seem more comprehensible than the versified love pangs (heterosexual and homosexual) of canons, bishops and cardinals. We should remember, however, that the paradigmatic love celebrated by the Petrarchan classicists is upliftingly spiritual and Platonic, while the macrotext of the Canzoniere was read as the diary of a conscience torn between this world and the next, a conflict ultimately resolved in a renunciatory ascetic penitential direction.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Italian Literature , pp. 251 - 276

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521434928.014 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 1997

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