The humanist
literature of Europe begins
with Francesco
Petrarca (1304-74), who was born in Arezzo
but brought up in southeast France, his parents being exiled
by the same Florentine decree as Dante
a generation before. Petrarch
spent much of his early life in Avignon,
was educated in Montpellier and Bologna, but returned to
work in various clerical offices in Avignon
when his father died in 1326. His Latin poetry and scholarship
made him famous, and in 1341 he was crowned as poet laureate
in Rome, which brought various diplomatic duties. Petrarch's
best work was inspired by young love — of an unidentified
Laura,
met in Avignon on 6th April 1327 and immortalised long after
her death from plague in 1348. Petrarch was better educated
in the classics than Dante and more likeable, travelling
happily between courts in Italy, France and the Rhineland.
He consciously emulated the classics, assembling a large
library and personally finding, publishing and popularizing
the manuscripts that languished unread in cathedral libraries.
Petrarch's
poetry
Most of Petrarch's writing was in Latin,
and is now forgotten — not because Latin is a dead
tongue, but because in rigidly following classical models
in works like De
Viris Illustribus, Africa,
Eclogues,
SecretumandDe
Remediis Utriusque Fortunae, Petrarch put too little
of his own thoughts and times into their composition. What
does survive are the works written in Italian:
letters, Trionfi
and Canzoniere.
Triofi
was an allegorical procession of figures: Love, Chastity,
Death, Fame, Time and Divinity, with Divinity finally triumphant.
TheCanzoniere
were his love lyrics to Laura. They drew on popular literature
and folk song, but Petrarch gave
them an entrancing
form that evoked enthusiasm throughout
Europe, and which still shapes western literature. Even
in English,
much of the poetry of Chaucer,
Wyatt,
SurreyShakespeare and Donne
is unthinkable without Petrarch — in the popularisation
of the sonnet
sequence, in the intimate reference to antiquity and in
the adoration of a human body and the feelings it inspires.
Did Laura exist? Probably, but like many poets, Petrarch
loved her through the poetry he created: workaday matrimony
was never an option for this most passionate of idealists.
Petrarchism
Though romantic love begins with 11-13th century troubadour
poetry in its adoration of a noble lady as the earthly representative
of spiritual beauty — and was given unforgettable expression
in Dante's Divine Comedy — it was Petrarch who developed
the pangs of love into an extended series of poems: her
dazzling beauty, angelic purity, the anguish of rejection
versus
desire for possession — restrictions that feminism
strugglesagainst.
Petrarch introduced the catalogue of physical perfections
and the extended metaphors
that sees eyes as windows to the soul, etc., which feature
so prominently
in 300
years of Renaissance poetry, and which are only outdone
(in range and ingenuity) by medieval
Islamic poetry. Petrarch's influence was immediate and
overwhelming: all the great figures of European literature
draw on and extend his legacy: Chaucer,
Ariosto,
Tasso,
Ronsard,
de Vega, Gongora,
Camões, Shakespeare.
Whatever their individual failings, Pope,
Byron,
Rossetti
and even Ezra Pound continued
the tradition, which is still much alive of course in popular
literature.
