Word: petrarchism
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...Petrarch's personal and literary attitude toward Dante...
...Dante we have had an example of a great national poet, and as contrasts are more striking than parallels-if, indeed, when we treat of so wayward a thing as human nature it be possible to find two lines of life that run parallel-I turned from him to Petrarch and the sentimentalists. The comparison enables us to feel more keenly the difference between real heartwood and veneer, between a poem made out of a true life, and a false life attempted to be made into a poem. I shall turn back today to a poem as sincere as that...
...darkness of the Middle Ages. Even during this period of darkness many paintings were made, and the wonder is not that the work which this age produced is poor, but that it could produce any work at all. The great men of Italy were Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch. They represented three great elements of art, the religious, the realistic and the classical, and these are the fundamental elements of all the Renaissance painting...
Dante and Petrarch do not belong to the same school. Dante was still of the mediaeval times, for he thought only of the universe and the city of God, and Virgil was interesting to him only because they led him through the universe. But Petrarch thought of the present world, the life of to-day, and the classics were interesting to him as expressions of men's lives at that time. Petrarch was a "humanist." Dante still clung to the religious beliefs and drawbacks of mediaeval times...
...Petrarch was the first great figure of the Renaissance. He is distinct from Dante not it his Italian poems nor in his love for Laura, but in his being possessed by the passion of the Renaissance. Virgil is not only a guide but a master, a supreme authority, whose style, whose every peculiarity must be absorbed as must the whole spirit of Greek and Roman civilization. Petrarch assumes the Roman point of view and speaks of the barbarians, meaning the French and Germans. These were the nations who had founded great Universities, had developed Gothic architecture and had produced...