I've been reading an essay entitled Petrarch, Dante, Cavalcanti
by Baranski. It talks about the complex relationship between Petrarch
and Dante, some of the ways this relationship has been interpreted by
other literary historians, and new ways to approach Petrarch's
appreciation of Dante. I'm wondering a lot lately about the general
questions of my thought over the past about five years: what is
modernity? from whence did modernity come? what does modernity
represent? what are the concrete manifestations of modernity? etc. This
essay sets up a dialogue in my mind that seats Dante in a classical
sense, and Petrarch in a modern sense, but it seems this is the opposite
of reality...
Baranski discusses Petrarch's criticism of Dante's Comedy. Petrarch's criticism comes from a few different angles: he examines the Comedy
and finds that Dante claims he is the sixth of a line of classical
poets. His authority rests within the poem that he writes, where he
claims greatness by associating himself with those personages. It's
almost as if he proclaims himself a prophet by imaging this journey into
the divinity, and by telling the story of his dream he is magically
granted authority. Petrarch examines and critiques this authority in
several different works, and even put together a letter to a fan of
Dante that hides subtle, yet powerful criticisms.
I'm
wondering if there is a crossroads here. Petrarch criticizes Dante for
his appeal to the common through the vernacular, and argues that his
work fails to meet classical standards because of this ambition.
Petrarch also argues that Dante's near-claim to divinity is impious and
debases his art. Petrarch positions himself as a poet that presents
something different, which includes more honesty about his non-divinity,
or more acknowledgement of personal failure. It seems Petrarch sets the
stage for modern poetry when he criticizes the Comedy for its claims to divine authority. The precedence that Petrarch sets in the Canzoniere is that of personal lyric poetry that doesn't make claims to high authority.
I'm
puzzling through a few different ideas here. Sometimes I want to think
of Petrarch as the progenitor of the modern, but then I find language
where he condemns it. Part of his criticism of Dante is that he's merely
writing the Comedy for vainglorious reasons: he wants the fame
of the now, so he crafts a story that is in the common tongue and speaks
to the common aesthetic. Petrarch argues that this betrays flaws in
Dante's ethic, or that it's a symptom of an imperfect virtue. Petrarch
believes that Dante crafted the Comedy with the intent of
establishing his own authority and equating it with those of the epic
poets of antiquity. Petrarch would rather seat himself in real, living
virtue, instead of dead on a pedestal amongst giants.
I've
gotta do more of an examination of Petrarch's Christianity, and his
ideas about poetic craft and history. There are a few epics he wrote,
and many of the sonnets and other poems in the Canzoniere I've
still yet to read. To me it seems he sits at the crux of the classical
and the modern, of the sacred and the secular. He seems to be the key to
what separates our modern conceptions of creation from those
mythologies of antiquity. All of this seems reductionist, but I needed
to write it out for my own understanding. Maybe the words work
themselves out, the libraries research themselves, the enjoyer enjoys
the enjoying.
