The Book of Firsts by Peter D'Epiro

Author:Peter D'Epiro
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307476661
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-12-21T21:00:00+00:00

95 Who wrote the first sonnets?

The Sicilian poet and court official Giacomo da Lentini, c. 1233

IN CANTO 24 OF THE PURGATORIO, Dante sees the soul of an earlier Italian poet doing penance for the sin of gluttony and uses the occasion to deliver himself of a little disquisition on what made his own love poetry so much better than that of his interlocutor—and of Giacomo da Lentini and yet a third Italian poet who is mentioned: the fact that Dante was truly inspired by the emotion of love, almost as if he were taking dictation from its personified god, whereas the others were mere imitators.

Indeed, the poetic style of Giacomo da Lentini (d. c. 1250), designated by his birthplace in east-central Sicily, is often pedestrian and drab and his syntactical structures shaky. The conventionality of his verse, which rings slight changes on the clichéd tropes of the Provençal troubadours, reminds us that Giacomo and his colleagues of the so-called Sicilian School of poetry—the earliest to write in Italian—were true amateurs. They all held down demanding day jobs as judges, chancellors, magistrates, and other busy officials for the Italian-born Frederick II—called “the Wonder of the World”—the erudite Holy Roman Emperor and king of Sicily whose brilliant roving court was often based in Palermo from about 1220 to his death in 1250. Frederick’s courtiers (and the king himself and his sons) dabbled in love poetry, especially in the form of the long, elaborate song known as the canzone, but writing poems remained for them an aristocratic refinement that rounded them out as accomplished gentlemen. Indeed, Giacomo was known as “the Notary,” a position vastly more prestigious than its modern counterpart.

Almost a third of about 125 surviving poems from the Sicilian School are by Giacomo da Lentini, many more than by any of his colleagues. He seems to have been the leader of the group, which included several other poets of considerable talent (not all Sicilians, but also including southern Italians and Tuscans). His greatest gift to posterity, however, was the invention of the intricately rhymed, fourteen-line poems known as sonnets (“little songs”), the first of which may well have originated as a stanza of an unfinished canzone that was then prized for its succinctness and cultivated as a separate form.

In an Italian sonnet’s first eight lines (the octet), a problem is posed or a situation established, which is then resolved, completed, contradicted, or commented on in the last six lines (the sestet). A common Italian rhyme scheme is abbaabba cdecde, but there are many variations. About twenty-five of Giacomo’s sonnets have survived, though not in their original Sicilian dialect but in later Tuscanized versions.

Many of his sonnets are marred by frigid conceits: He’s saturated with love—like a water-soaked sponge; he’s like a plucked lily when he’s away from his lady, rapidly fading away; like a moth to the flame, he doesn’t fear being consumed by his love, which will, in fact, renew him, as self-immolation did for the legendary phoenix. He’s tiresome

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