Renaissance Lyric Poetry

Much information about, and even the canon of Mikołaj Sęp Szarzyński’s works (? – 1580) still remain probable but not fully ascertained. The little book published twenty years after his death, Rytmy, a single copy of which survives – it was found accidentally in the early 1800s – represents his uncertain legacy. Yet not only Sęp is the greatest pre-modern Polish poet after Kochanowski, but, due to his sonnets and other compositions of his early maturity, he can be considered the creator of a new style that, under the influence of late Italian Petrarchism, brings Polish poetry closer to mannerism and, for some commentators, to baroque. This essay focuses in particular on sonnet 3, "To the Most Holy Virgin ". While revealing many connections with Dante and Petrarca, it takes on themes and styles of the Spanish Marian literature that was almost contemporary with the young author. This poem constitutes the cornerstone of a sonnet cycle (the first in Polish literature) that marks the artistic culmination of a “passage” to modernity, in which an attitude of doubt and the attendant "grammar of uncertainty" (J. Błoński) become the writer’s main stylistic and existential signature.

This article takes as its point of departure what Bataille calls the “nauseating banality” that flowers are both symbolic of everlasting love and comically short-lived. The comparison of women to flowers in early modern lyric, already by the sixteenth century veering into the territory of cliché, often explicitly thematized—rather than trying to gloss over—the proximity of flowering to withering, a proximity highlighted by the French equivalents of those words, fleuri and flétri. In both Petrarchan and carpe diem traditions, female figures were both essential and essentially expendable. Even the most conventional love poems failed to stay on this side of garbage, as wispy images of women became disfigured into decaying organic material in the space of a single sonnet. Focusing on poems by Pierre de Ronsard and Robert Herrick, I show how these very different poets were engaged in the same misogynist cultural project, a project that takes as a premise that the smooth transition of women from vibrant matter to rotting trash is remarkable in its unremarkableness. These poets, I argue, approached the woman-flower trope with a desire and disdain comparable to their sentiments for the women their poems represented. Viewing women as neither invitingly immediate nor ethereally inaccessible, treating their bodies as dead weight or garbage rather than as property of any value, these poets used the timeless ephemerality of both women and cliché to negotiate their own ambivalence to poetry and immortality.

The essay addresses the relationships between dance and literary text through a thematic path within Tasso’s lyrical poems which, from time to time, have considered the choreutic experience as a lyric-narrative situation, as a structural pattern of composition, and as an exemplary practice of reconfiguration (including the political one) of the dyalectic between desire and time. As symbolic stylizations of the dynamics of courtship, the abstract social dances of the festive courtesan protocol were based in fact on codified micro-gestures with evident semantic functionality but also with undeniable erotic implications, which Tasso fully exploits in his lyric production.

Este estudio aborda un género clave de la poesía renacentista: la epístola ética, escrita en metros castellanos o italianos y destinada a amigos, poetas o mecenas a modo de "conversaciones en verso". En estos poemas se encuentran ideas éticas sobre cómo vivir mejor o encontrar la felicidad, a partir de los consejos de Horacio, Séneca, Aristóteles... Al mismo tiempo, se descubre la vida cotidiana y las preocupaciones del siglo XVI. A través del análisis de los primeros ejemplos del género en castellano, desde Sá de Miranda, Boscán, Garcilaso y Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, hasta Eugenio Salazar, conocemos quiénes son sus autores y destinatarios, y cómo se proyectan en los textos y juegan con su imagen ética, psicológica y literaria.

In the Renaissance admiration for Lucretius was widespread, but it nevertheless had to comply with a set of unwritten rules in order for the De Rerum Natura to be read and allowed into humanist culture. Spared from the index of forbidden books, humanists had to be particularly careful when handling this epicurean, materialistic, soul's-immortality-denying poem. The key factor was probably the prohibition on translating the poem into the vernacular: the fate met by Alessandro Marchetti's belated attempt is usually proof enough of the perils that awaited the transgressors. What became explicit in Marchetti's case had implicitly been the rule since the poem's unearthing: this only partially discouraged humanists enticed by the charm of Lucretius' poetry. Not only did the DRN serve as model for vernacular or neo-Latin poetry in general, but also literal translations of Lucretian lines or groups of lines appear everywhere in Italian vernacular poetry of the time. Not surprisingly then, the scholarship keeps tenuous trace of not one but two complete, unpublished sixteenth-century vernacular translations of the DRN: one by Neapolitan aristocrat Giovan Francesco Muscettola, the other by professional letterato and philosopher Tito Giovanni Ganzarini from Scandiano. Nothing remains of either translation, but much can be inferred regarding their quality, relevance and circulation from the two authors' circumstances, their epistolaries, their surviving writings. The aim of this paper is to outline this neglected but all-important episode within the history of Lucretius' Renaissance reception.

The Spanish Renaissance poet-priest Fernando de Herrera's sonnet "Por un camino solo al sol abierto" deftly combines influences from the Bible and from Italian Renaissance poets in a poem that deftly evokes pilgrimage as well as Christian and erotic love.

Traditionally attributed to King Solomon and defined by Rabbi Akiva as the “Holy of Holies” among the sacred scriptures (Mishnah Yadayim 3:5), the Song of Songs is one of the most fascinating and controversial Biblical books. Fervently read and carefully explained, celebrated as a key to the supreme mystery of the union between God and men, the Song of Songs, the primary source for the Christian pervasive metaphor of the sacred marriage and eros, was a text crucial not only to the Middle Ages, but also to the Renaissance period. This ambivalent book, which combined a sensual celebration of love with a well-established tradition of allegorical interpretation, held a particular appeal for poets. While its scriptural nature and exegetical reading allowed the text to function as a source of symbolically and allegorically charged images, the Song of Solomon stood up as one of the few Christian alternatives to classical love poetry, and was therefore destined to play a significant role in the shaping of European poetry from its very beginning.
Part of an ongoing project conducted by Camilla Caporicci at the University of Padova, funded through the MSCA (Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions) Seal of Excellence@UNIPD Initiative, this conference aims at exploring the complex processes through which the Song of Songs entered, influenced and interacted with late medieval and Renaissance European poetry (13th-17th centuries).

One of the most intriguing studies of John Donne's poetry ever published was a book issued in 1967 by N. J. C. Andreasen. Titled John Donne: Conservative Revolutionary, this work argued that Donne was in his morality a conservative Christian but a revolutionary in his style of writing. Andreasen's approach helps to make Donne's career as a writer seem far more consistent, and far less confusing, than it can seem from the perspective of other points of view. How, readers of Donne often ask, could the writer of some of the most powerful religious poems in the English language also write poems that sometimes verge on pornography? How could he celebrate ideal Christian love in some poems and then express bold, bodily, merely physical eroticism in others? How could he write some poems in which women are treated with enormous respect and admiration and then also write other poems in which women seem to be sexually objectified, sometimes in very crude terms? Answers to these questions have been various. Some critics have argued that the Donne who wrote poems stressing mere physical appetite was the youthful Donne ("Jack Donne"), while the Donne who wrote poems celebrating genuine married love and mutual spiritual devotion was an older Donne, a more mature and spiritually committed individual. The problem with this response is that Donne wrote one of his most impassioned and philosophically serious defenses of Christianity and Christian morals ("Satire III") during the very same period when he was writing some of his most obviously explicit "pagan" poems. Another way of explaining Donne's apparent inconsistency is to assume that he wrote some poems with one audience in mind (for instance, an audience of randy young men) and other poems for a different, more deeply religious readership. But it would have been hard to keep these two kinds of audiences from finding out about one another and about the kinds of poems supposedly written only for each of them. Of course, there are other possible explanations as well, including these: (1) Donne was a hypocrite; (2) Donne was somewhat schizophrenic; (3) Donne never intended or claimed to be consistent; (4) Donne, as a talented poet and sophisticated thinker, was exploring and expressing a whole range of possible thoughts and feelings and felt no need to make them all conform to one another. Still, it is difficult to read "Satire III" and then turn, say, to the famously erotic (possibly pornographic) poem titled "To His Mistress Going to Bed" and try to understand how the same person could have written both poems, especially during roughly the same period of time. "Satire III" expresses deep and obvious commitment to the pursuit of spiritual truth; "To his Mistress" is full of jokes about male arousal, fantasies about sexual conquest, and a quite explicit focus mostly on one part of a woman's body, a part that the speaker says he wants to view as freely as a midwife might. The speaker's main interest is vigorous sexual activity, not deep spiritual union. Andreasen's book suggests various ways to make sense of this and other apparent contradictions in Donne's writing and thought. Essentially, Andreasen sees them not as contradictions at all. Instead, she thinks that in some poems (such as the Holy Sonnets and the obviously spiritual love poems), Donne was endorsing Christian morality in fairly explicit ways. And she thinks that in other poems-poems in which speakers seem to focus on merely physical eroticism-he was promoting Christian morality through the use of irony. Such irony, she thinks, would have been obvious to many Christian readers of his day. Donne, Andreasen suggests, often goes out of his way to include clues that the speakers of his blatantly erotic poems should not be taken seriously. In other words, Donne sometimes created speakers who, because of their almost exclusive focus on mere physical eroticism, would have been recognized as fools by sophisticated readers. He usually gives these

The love poetry written in England from roughly 1500 to roughly 1660 is some of the most important verse in the English language. This is true for various reasons. First, love was an immensely popular topic in many different kinds of literature from this period. (See, for instance, Shakespeare's plays.) Therefore, what is written about love in, say, Renaissance drama often reflects many of the same ideas dealt with in the poetry of the time. Secondly, the love poetry of this era was immensely and demonstrably popular during the period itself. Renaissance poets enjoyed writing about love, and they enjoyed imitating and responding to each other's writings about this topic. This popularity of love as a theme, both among readers and writers from this era, can tell us a great deal about the values and mores of the entire English Renaissance. Moreover, Renaissance love poetry has remained widely read in the centuries since it was first produced. Arguably no other time or place in the history of writing about love, at least in the English language, produced so much or such memorable verse concerning erotic feelings and attitudes. Finally, because of its enduring popularity, Renaissance love poetry helped influence the ways subsequent readers and writers of literature in English have thought about the subject of amorous desire. Often, I would argue, Renaissance love poetry tends to be misread and misunderstood because of a few basic mistakes that modern readers frequently make. First, they sometimes assume that the writer of the poem and the speaker of the poem are identical. They assume that Renaissance love poets were inevitably using their poems to articulate their own personal attitudes in very blatant and simple ways: If the speaker of a poem says A, then the writer of the poem must also accept A. If the speaker of a poem says B, then the writer of the poem must also agree with what the speaker has just said about B. But this is not always the case. Secondly, I believe that we often miss much of the sheer comedy of Renaissance love poetry. We often take quite seriously what seems to have been meant in jest; we often impute to the poets the foolish, comic views of the poems' speakers. In short, we frequently miss the sheer hilarious irony of many Renaissance love poems-irony that makes the poems seem funny on one level but intriguingly serious on another. It is the irony of so many Renaissance love poems (I would argue) that gives them their real moral depth. By implicitly mocking the self-centered desires of so many of the poems' speakers, the writers of the poems implicitly endorse the Christian morality that was taken so seriously at the time. Most writers of Renaissance love poetry were demonstrably serious and committed Christians. They often wrote openly religious verse and prose even while also writing "love" poetry that can frequently seem irreligious unless it is read ironically. Understanding the irony of much of the love poetry, I suggest, is the key to understanding how so many sincerely committed Christians could write poetry that seems erotically frivolous. They were, in a phrase, teaching through ridicule-making serious moral points by using comic, implicitly satirical methods. 1

Solitamente, «antico e laudato costume è degli espositori [􏰂]􏰃 è quello di commentare in maniera autonoma l􏰁a􏰄􏰅􏰆􏰇e oggetto della propria esposizione, ma nel caso del commento di Giovanni A. Gesualdo al canzoniere petrarchesco l􏰁i􏰈g􏰆􏰉b􏰇a􏰈􏰅e figura del suo mentore ed insegnante Antonio Minturno rappresenta un caso, forse unico, di trasmissione univoca di note, questioni e riflessioni critiche che andrebbero meglio inquadrate per codificare quanto realmente dipenda dalla penna del primo e quanto dall􏰁a􏰈ali􏰊i condotta sul testo e sulla lingua volgare dal teorico Aurunco. In molti luoghi della Sposizione, infatti, lo stesso Gesualdo riconduce le sue riflessioni in maniera palese all􏰁i􏰈􏰊eg􏰈a􏰉e􏰈􏰅􏰆 di Minturno (di cui si ricorda il perduto dialogo l􏰁Accademia) ricordandone le lezioni e soprattutto i principali motivi interpretativi. Sarà oggetto di questa comunicazione, dunque, 􏰄􏰈􏰁a􏰈ali􏰊i approfondita dei passaggi esistenti tra le due figure e tra le due diverse visioni interpretative. La Spositione sul Petrarca di Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo è perciò un caso se non unico, sicuramente raro, di commento redatto non a una, ma a due voci: la sua e quella del suo mentore Antonio Minturno, il quale, oltre che rappresentare un punto di riferimento critico e teorico imprenscindibile è anche il punto di partenza dal quale si origina una sorta di trasmissione univoca di note, questioni e riflessioni critiche che questa comunicazione vuole indagare per codificare una linea di separazione ottimale tra le posizioni teoriche del maestro e quelle individuali dell􏰁allie􏰋􏰆 e nipote.