Notes

Petrarch: An Introduction

1. C. S. Lewis, for example, points out that “the difference between the Vita Nuova and Petrarch’s Rime is that Petrarch abandoned the prose links, and it was they that carried the narrative” (327). Teodolinda Barolini adds, “In other words, Petrarch takes the idea from Dante of transcribing previously written lyrics into a new order where the order generates significance, but he does not take Dante’s means of controlling significance, namely the prose” (2).

2. David Kalstone, in a study of Sidney’s poetry, makes the useful point that Petrarch’s appeal is finally based on the ability of his poems, both individually and as a sequence, to hold contrary emotions in an equilibrium. What makes this possible is the concentration on memory. Pain and sweetness, recollected, reveal their paradoxical joint existence, even perhaps their interdependence. The memory of Laura, which is also the memory of Petrarch’s failure to persuade her to return his love, persists as an inspiration, a token from the past that clarifies and illuminates the present and the future. Morris Bishop, in his biography, sounds a similar note: “In the chemistry of the spirit the emotions do not neutralize each other” (247).

3. Bishop quotes Edgar Quinet, a nineteenth-century French critic: “Petrarch’s originality consists in having realized, for the first time, that every moment in our existence contains in itself the substance of a poem, that every hour encloses an immortality” (253).

4. Hainsworth, 25. He further notes that Petrarch was fond of Horace’s metaphor for the poet as a bee who collects pollen from many sorts of flowers. “His own pollen came from all sorts of textual and stylistic bric-a-brac—conceits, conversational phrases, echoes of Latin, Provençal, Dante and other Italians, bits of high rhetoric, conventional images, even clichés. The magic lies in how it comes together and also in its awareness of its own problematic status.”

5. The Africa was intended to be his ticket to fame, an epic that would recapture the glory of the past. But while it has some fine passages, it is, by common agreement, mostly frigid and dull, boring in the extreme to modern readers. At some level Petrarch must have sensed this, for he tended to keep it to himself, and his anxiety about its success was evident in many of his actions and statements. If it dawned on him that his lyric poems would turn out to be the real testimony to his poetic genius, the recognition came late.

6. In retreating to rural solitude, not like a hermit bent on prayer and self-denial but rather like a man who enjoys communing with himself in the friendly presence of nature, Petrarch picked up a classical tradition and founded what we might call the modern tradition exemplified by figures such as Thoreau. Here is a passage from one of his letters about his Vaucluse retreat: “You will see me content with a small but shady garden and a tiny house.… You will see me from morn to eve wandering alone among the meadows, hills, springs, and woods. I flee men’s traces, follow the birds, love the shadows, enjoy the mossy caves and the greening fields, curse the cares of the Curia, avoid the city’s tumult, refuse to cross the thresholds of the mighty, mock the concerns of the mob. I am equidistant from joy and sadness, at peace by day and night. I glory in the Muses’ company, in bird-song and the murmur of water-nymphs. My servants are few but my books many.” From Familiar Letters, 6, 3, as quoted in Bishop, 136.

7. The suggestion provoked a pained and vigorous denial: “So what do you say? That I invented the beautiful name of Laura to give myself something to talk about and to engage many to talk about me! And that in fact there is no Laura in my mind except the poetic Laurel for which I evidently have aspired with long-continued un-wearying zeal; and that concerning the living Laura, by whose person I seem to be captured, everything is manufactured; that my poems are fictitious, my sighs pretended. Well, on this head I wish it were all a joke, that it were a pretense and not a madness! But believe me, no one can simulate long without great effort; to labor to appear mad, to no purpose, is the height of madness. Add that we can in health imitate the behavior of the sick, but we cannot simulate pallor.” From Epistolae Familiares 2, 9, as quoted in Thompson.

8. For example, among the last sonnets he wrote was a pair that he inserted into the first half, 194 and 197. See Wilkins, Making of the “Canzoniere,” 367.

9. Of the 366 poems in the collection, 317 are sonnets, followed by twenty-nine canzones, nine sestinas (one of which is double), seven ballatas, and four madrigals. The sestinas, with their repeating end words and strict patterning, are especially good at reinforcing the obsessive, time-trapped nature of the speaker’s dilemma. Some of the canzones choose especially demanding Provençal forms in complex stanzas that match rhymes and repeat difficult patterns. The sonnets, of course, are of the formal Italian type that uses just two rhymes in the octave and two or three in the sestet. Their two-part structure is thus more emphatic than it is in Shakespearean examples.

10. From volume 7 of his Storia della letteratura italiana, as quoted in Bishop, 254.