Petrarch Read Online Free PDF

the letter to Giacomo Co-lonna denying
     that he had tried to “fool the world” with his Laura, he reveals himself in a backhanded
     manner: “If on this dubious, slippery, questionable course, a man should be so clever,
     by nature or study, as to dodge the world’s wiles and cheat the world itself, by outwardly
     resembling the common man but inwardly keeping his own character, what would you say
     of him? Where can we find such a man? He would need a superior nature, mature sobriety,
     and much shrewdness in his judgment of others. But this is how you describe me!” (
Familiares
II, 9). People read his love poems and revered him for the human interest in his
     story, which then became a substitute for his own spiritual and intellectual self.
    Any survey of literary history reveals that Petrarch did not begin with whole cloth
     when he pieced together the components of his persona. He had available to him a complex
     set of authorial masks to assume, some of which he unearthed himself from obscurity,
     others of which were already well known—easily recognized and understood by his peers.
     The
Canzoniere
offers itself not only as a log of his time and handbook of lyric forms but also
     as a textbook of literary
topoi
—topics which poets and rhetoricians had addressed as far back as the first recorded
     poem. Durling (p. 9) lists a “repertory of situations” Petrarch inherited from the
     romance tradition to which he lends his intensely original interpretations: “love
     at first sight, obsessive yearning and lovesickness, frustration, love as parallel
     to feudal service; the lady as ideally beautiful, ideally virtuous, miraculous, beloved
     in Heaven, and destined to early death; love as virtue, love as idolatry, love as
     sensuality; the god of love with his arrows, fire, whips, chains; war with the self—hope,
     fear, joy, sorrow.” The poet may strike many attitudes springing from the course of
     real events (since his own history is woven into the fabric of his fiction) but also
     from states of mind and emotions every love poet was expected to experience. Petrarch
     seems to have drawn a vast stock of subject matter from earlier traditions; rhetorically
     there is little of the work that cannot be traced to the literature preceding him.
    Some of the prominent themes Petrarch drew from the past include the belief in the
     divinity of poets, along with the conviction that poets and leaders
(capitani)
together can raise up humanity; the identification of love with creative vision (the
     rapture and clear-sightedness of love); claims to be unique in his age symbolized
     in the
Canzoniere
by the phoenix; the intention to consecrate the name of the idealized love object,
     first mentioned in poem 5 and recapitulated in poem 297; the habit of recapitulation
     itself; vaunting of the anger and pride of the poet
genus irritabile vatum)
—poses closely connected with a humility that requires silence on the one hand and
     speaking out about one’s knowledge on the other; affectations of modesty, trepidation,
     submission, and incapacity (
mediocritas mea)
—forms of self-disparagement often assumed in imperial Rome (notably by Cicero), in
     which the satirist makes a gesture of submission to the emperor in order to gain an
     audience; the consolatory pose “everyone must die”; the pose of the
puer senex,
or wisdom of age in youth (see poems 182 and 215); self-admonitions to be brief and
     not cause boredom to the lady (see poems 82,130, and 359); the appeal to those sensitive
     to sweetness; the invocation of nature and the idea of
l’aura
as carrier of the bitter and the sweet; the use of the book as a compendium of knowledge
     patterned as a weaving or mosaic; the habit of enumeration and “eroticintellectual trifling”; inclusion of “rhetorical bravura pieces” in which compendious
     knowledge is jumbled together (as in the
frottola
[tall tale] of poems 105 or 135); the practice of listing