Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture

1. Dante and the Lyric Past

c h a p t e r 1 Dante and the Lyric Past D ante is heir to a complex and lively Italian lyric tradition that had its roots in the Provençal poetry nourished by the rivalling courts of twelfth-century southern France. The conventions of troubadour love poetry—based on the notion of the lover’s feudal service to ‘‘midons ’’ (Italian, madonna), his lady, from whom he expects a ‘‘guerdon ’’ (Italian, guiderdone), or reward—were successfully transplanted to the court of Frederick II in Palermo. Palermo became the capital of the first group of Italian vernacular lyric poets, the so-called Sicilian School; the centralized imperial court did not offer a suitable venue for the transplantation of Provence’s contentious political poetry, which was left behind. The ‘‘leader’’ (Italian, caposcuola) of the Sicilian School was Giacomo da Lentini, most likely the inventor of the sonnet (while the Provençal canso was the model for the Italian canzone, the sonnet is an Italian, and specifically Sicilian, contribution to the various European lyric genres). Giacomo signs himself ‘‘the Notary,’’ referring to his position in the imperial government; this is the title Dante uses for him in Purgatorio 24, where the poet Bonagiunta is assigned the task of dividing the Italian lyric tradition between the old—represented by Giacomo, Guittone, and Bonagiunta himself—and the new: the avant-garde poets of the ‘‘dolce stil novo’’ or ‘‘sweet new style‘‘ (Purg. 24.57), as Dante retrospectively baptizes the lyric movement that he helped spearhead in his youth. Like Giacomo, the other Sicilian poets were in the main court functionaries: in the De vulgari eloquentia Guido delle Colonne is called ‘‘Judge of Messina,’’ while Pier della Vigna, whom Dante places among the suicides in hell, was Frederick’s chancellor and private secretary. Their moment in history coincides Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture 24 with Frederick’s moment, and the demise of their school essentially coincides with the emperor’s death in 1250. At the heart of troubadour poetry is an unresolved tension between the poet-lover’s allegiance to the lady and his allegiance to God; the love-service owed the one inevitably comes into conflict with the love-service owed the other. Giacomo da Lentini renders the conflict with great clarity in this sonnet (Io m’aggio posto in core a Dio servire): Io m’aggio posto in core a Dio servire, com’io potesse gire in paradiso, al santo loco ch’aggio audito dire, u’ si mantien sollazzo, gioco e riso. Sanza mia donna non vi voria gire, quella c’ha blonda testa e claro viso, ché sanza lei non poteria gaudere, estando da la mia donna diviso. Ma no lo dico a tale intendimento, perch’io peccato ci volesse fare; se non veder lo suo bel portamento e lo bel viso e ’l morbido sguardare: che lo mi teria in gran consolamento, veggendo la mia donna in ghiora stare. I have proposed in my heart to serve God, that I might go to paradise, to the holy place of which I have heard said that there are maintained pleasure, play, and laughter. Without my lady I do not wish to go, the one who has a blond head and a clear face, since without her I could not take pleasure, being from my lady divided. But I do not say this with such an intention, that I would want to commit a sin; but rather because I would want to see her beautiful comportment and her beautiful face and her sweet glance: for it would keep me in great consolation, to see my lady be in glory.1 Giacomo’s sonnet exemplifies the courtly dilemma of conflicted desire. In it, the poet deploys the considerable resources of the sonnet as a formal construct in such a way as to highlight and dramatize his theme, which is that he—like the sonnet itself—is ‘‘diviso’’ (8), divided in two. The Sicilian sonnet is divided into two parts, set off from each other by a change in rhyme: the octave rhymes ababab, and the sextet rhymes cdcdcd. While there are possible variations in the rhyme scheme of the sextet (it could be cdecde, for instance), there is always a switch at this point from the a and b rhymes to a new set of rhymes; Dante and the Lyric Past 25 there...