November 1

The Art of Love:
Some Approaches to Renaissance Lyric

(Note: What follows supplements material on poetic form and on Petrarch and Petrarchism found on class handout.)

The Significance of Fixed Form

Form puts language under pressure. In the love sonnet, the speaker's most extreme emotions are ordered and controlled by the strict limitations of the form. The result is a particular kind of poetic economy, a lovely condensation, compression, concision.

To write within rules offers yet another example of literature as a kind of serious play.

The sonnet offers infinite riches in a little room; it's another variation on the Renaissance interest in the microcosmos. Its single stanza (stanza = room in Italian) could be thought of as a little world of the emotions.

Popularity of Love Lyric/Sonnet Sequence in Elizabethan England

Petrarch as Pop Icon

Consider the popularity of Petrarch’s 14^th century lyric sequence the Rime Sparse ("scattered rhymes") as a model.

• Chaucer is the first English author to translate a Petrarch sonnet, but ...
• Petrarch’s work is popularized in the early 16^th century translations and adaptatations of Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

Petrarch the Innovator

The Rime Sparseoffers several significant poetic innovations.

• Note its structure: a sequence of lyrics that evolves into a quasi-narrative organized around a series of meditations on a single object. (It is as if we get a photographic album full of snapshots of moods, emotions, visions, recollections; we are tempted to fill in the white space between them and create a narrative whole.)
• In attempting to describe the flux--the contradictions and the complexity--of his emotional situation, the poet plays with paradoxes and contradictions. Note Petrarch’s fondness for oxymoron (a figure of speech which combines apparently contradictory words and meanings).
• Petrarchan poetry also makes considerable use of elaborate and extended metaphors (e.g., the lover’s depiction of himself as a rudderless ship blown about by the cross winds of contradictory passions). Such elaborated and extended figures of speech are known as conceits. (Note the particularly highly developed conceit of love as monarch/general ruling the lover’s heart in Rime Sparse#140).

A tip: In reading these poems it is especially important to follow the unfolding of the poetic logic of their extended metaphors.

A Fruitful Contradiction

The very absence and silence of the lady in the Petrarchan sequences becomes a provocation to art:

• the characteristic Petrarchan situation is one where love has struck the poet but not the lady
• writing about desire substitutes for the consummation of desire
• the woman is always mediated through the poet’s desires and fantasies
• the poems tend to slide away from representing the Beloved into introversion, self-analysis, the dissection of the speaker’s feelings

Petrarch and the Petrarchists

Wyatt, Surrey, and the poets of the next two generations (Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Mary Wroth) took over the Petrarchan themes and poetic protocols and played around with them.

The poets of the late 16th century seem especially fond of

• Petrarch's use of paradox and oxymoron to represent the chaotic emotions of the lover
• his presentation of a male lover as subject to forces beyond his control
• his description of a perpetual war between the speaker's passion and his reason
• his externalization of love as an independent cosmic force (a thunderbolt, a wound, a flame) that assaults the speaker

At the same time, the familiar aspects of "Petrarchism" are regularly revised and even subverted. Petrarchism becomes a poetic idiom of great flexibility that can be deployed

• non-committallly
• playfully
• in a deeply serious and elevated fashion
• as a form of interrogation...

Indeed, in any fashion that the poet wishes.

(Cf. Shakespearian examples and also Wyatt’s and Spenser’s revisions of the Petrarchan "love hunt" on your handout.)

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