Part Two
The Italian Origin:
Petrarch's Canzoniere
Background
- The first sonnets were written in southern Italy and may date as far back as the first half of the thirteenth century.
- The first great sonnet sequence was Vita Nuova (The New Life) written by Dante Allighieri (1265-1321). These sonnets praised a young woman named Beatrice, who becomes Dante's symbol for transcendent beauty. Her purity and innocence comes to represent the spiritual perfection the poet yearns for.
- Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), known in the English speaking world as "Petrarch," set the standard for the sonnet for generations to come. Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Petrarch became the dominant force in poetry across the European continent.
- Though he was born in Tuscany, Italy, he lived near Avignon, France as a young man, . He was thus deeply influenced by the poets of the Provencal region of France and their rich lyrical tradition. Petrarch's sonnets combine the religious emphasis of the sonnets from the Northern Italian poets with the sensual lyric of the French Troubadours. Thus, Petrarch effectively combines the worlds of nature and spirit in his poetry.
- In 1336 Petrarch began composing a sonnet sequence about a woman named Laura. He continued to revise and reorder the sonnets until his death in 1374. They were published posthumously in 1470 with the title Canzoniere (translated as "Songbook").
- Petrarch wrote the Canzoniere in the Italian vernacular rather than Latin. It was considered, along with Dante's Commedia a landmark in vernacular literature.
- The Canzoniere is a collection of 366 lyrics (including sonnets, canzones, sestinas, ballads and madrigals), totaling the number of days in the yearly cycle. The subject of this work is a singular--the praise of a woman named Laura. It is widely accepted among scholars that Laura was an actual person in Petrarch's life, perhaps a burgher's daughter, with whom the poet had fallen in love. The character of Laura is the model of the Troubadour heroine: blonde, blue-eyed and inaccessible until the end. The story of this sonnet sequence is bipartite: The first part deals with the poet's infatuation with Laura's beauty; the second part deals with the poet's reaction to her untimely death.
- The "Italian" or "Petrarchan" sonnet used an abbaabba cdcdcd rhyme scheme. In this form the poem was divided into two sections, an octave (the first eight lines) and a sestet (the last six lines). The shift from the octave to the sestet often marks a dramatic turn ("volta") in the poem.
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