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Donne's Conceit And Petrarchan Wit

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Donald L. Guss
Donald L. Guss*
Affiliation:
Wayne State University, Detroit 2, Mich
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Extract

Donne's Wit has been linked to Caval-canti and Alciati, Marino and Ramus, Anacreon and St. Bonaventure. The variety of these analogues confronts scholars with a dilemma: for it suggests that The Songs and Sonets must be either a profound intellectual synthesis or a grotesque philosophical chaos; and yet in fact they are neither. The dilemma might be resolved, however, by the discovery that Donne's lyrics are in a tradition which accounts for both their sophisticated levity and their dramatic truth, both their epigrammatic neatness and their symbolic import. The work of the “presecentisti”—by which term I mean chiefly Serafino l'Aquilano, Torquato Tasso, and Guarino—forms such a tradition.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 78 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1963 , pp. 308 - 314
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1963

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References

1 W. J. Courthope, A History of English Poetry (London, 1903), in, 103–117, 147–168, says that Donne's conceit results from his awareness of the unresolved tensions within contemporary philosophy; and Courthope's analysis is considered definitive by Sir Herbert J. C. Grierson, ed. The Poems of John Donne (Oxford, 1912), ii, v–vi. Nonetheless, Donne seems to have tranquilly accepted the harmonious, if eclectic, Renaissance world view described by such scholars as Paul O. Kristeller, Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters (Rome, 1956), and Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1936).

2 Though the pre-secentisti are not primarily philosophical poets, Guarino fuses Petrarch's Christian doubts with courtly Neo-Platonism in poems such as Son. 100, “Questa terrena, ed infiammata cura,” and Tasso in poems such as 113, “Quel generoso mio guerriero interno.”

Unless otherwise noted, I use the following editions: for Serafino's sonnets, Le rime, ed. Mario Menghini (Bologna, 1894), i; for Serafino's strambotti, Opere … collette per Francesco Flavio (Venice, 1502); for Torquato Tasso, Le rime, ed. Angelo Solerti (Bologna, 1898), ii; for Giovanni Battista Guarino, Rime (Venice, 1598); for Francesco Petrarca, Le rime, ed. G. Carducci and S. Ferrari (Florence, 1957); and for John Donne, The Poems, ed. Sir Herbert Grierson (Oxford, 1933). The translations from the Italian are my own.

3 Petrarch 23, “Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade,” ll. 12–13; Serafino, Stram. 167, “Quanti occelletti el di faccio dolenti”; Pet. 119, “Una donna piÛ bella assai che '1 sole,” ll. 1–2; Tasso 84, “I freddi e muti pesci usati omai”; Pet. 23, “Nel dolce tempo,” l. 27; Guarino, Mad. 2, “Vien da l'onde, ò dal cielo?”

4 See Evelyn M. Simpson, “Donne's Spanish Authors,” MLR, xliii (1948), 185, and, on the compass image, Mario Praz, Secentismo e marinismo in Inghilterra (Florence, 1925), p. 109, n. 1, and Don Cameron Allen, “Donne's Compass Figure,” MLN, lxxi (1956), 256–257.

For the general influence of the pre-secentisti, see Ernest H. Wilkins, “A General Survey of Renaissance Petrarchism,” CL, ii (1950), 327–339; for English translations and imitations, see Janet G. Scott, Les sonnets élisabélhains (Paris, 1929), pp. 303–332, Antonio Cecchini, Serafino Aquilano e la lirica inglese del '500 (Aquila, 1935), and Mary A. Scott, “Elizabethan Translations from the Italian … ii. Translations of Poetry, Plays, and Metrical Romances,” PMLA, iv (1896), 389–398.

5 Donne's conjunction of love and death has been often understood to be a key to his psyche and to that of his age. Interestingly enough, it is here anticipated by Serafino in the High Rennaissance—and, indeed, it is one of Serarino's favorite witty devices, as several of his poems described below in various other contexts illustrate.

6 For the French imitations, see Joseph Vianey, Le Pétrarquisme en France au XVI e siècle (Montpellier, 1909), pp. 68–69, 125–126, 268.

7 For example, in the frontispiece of Whitney's “Choice of Emblems,” ed. Henry Green (London, 1866). See also Josef Lederer, “John Donne and the Emblematic Practice,” RES, xxii (1946), 196–197, and Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books (London, 1948), pp. 146–147.

8 The two-in-oneness of lovers is, of course, a commonplace in Italian literature from Jacopo da Lentini's “Uno disio d' amore sovente,” ll. 16–17, to Tasso's Conclusioni amorose, 36. One of its most famous statements is that of Marsilio Ficino, Commentaire sur Le banquet de Platon, ed. and trans. Raymond Marcel (Paris, 1956), Sp. ii, Ch. 8. Here Ficino's trivial subtlety and his insistent and paradoxical logic suggest both mediaeval Romance poetry and Donne; so do some of his images, especially the picture-on-the-heart and amorous rebirth.

9 See Whitney's “Choice,” p. 219, and Green's note, p. 395; D. Philippi Picinelli, Mundus Symbolicus (Cologne, 1694); and Mario Praz, Studies in Seventeenth Century Imagery, Studies of the Warburg Institute, III (London, 1939), i, 84. Praz, 84, n. 2, emphasizes that the image of the fly in the candle is commonplace in the Italian lyric long before the vogue of emblem books.

10 Here I follow the modern editors—Hebel and Hudson, Bennett, Heyward, and Shaaber, for example. Grierson, though noting “Naked” as a well-authorized variant, prints “In that.”

11 The assimilation of Petrarchism to Alexandrianism is itself a characteristic of pre-secenlismo—see James Hutton, The Greek Anthology in Italy to the Year 1800, Cornell St. in Eng., xxiii (Ithaca, N. Y., 1935), pp. 45–47, p. 56.

12 On the Petrarchan origin of most amorous emblems, see Mario Praz, “Petrarca e gli emblematisti,” Ricerche Anglo-lialiane (Rome, 1944), pp. 311–319.

13 For example, by Frank J. Warnke, “Marino and the English Metaphysicals,” SRen, ii (1955), 160–175, and Lauro Pettogello, “A Current Misconception Concerning the Influence of Marino's Poetry on Crashaw's,” MLR, lii (1957), 321–328.

It is possible that the element common to Donne's metaphysical poetry, Marinism, préciosité, and conceptismo and culteranismo is the influence of Serafino—see Vianey on the French and, on the Spanish, Joseph G. Fucilla, “Pedro de Padilla and the Current of the Italian Quattrocentist Preciosity in Spain,” PQ, ix (1930), 225–238. At any rate, to study examples of these various seventeenth-century styles in relation to Serafino might be to discover what is peculiar to each; it could certainly avoid losing individual poems in the murky fusion of the obscure baroque.

14 “John Donne e la poesia del suo tempo,” Machiavelli in Inghilterra ed altri saggi (Rome, 1942), p. 232. In general, in Italy metaphysical poetry (like Marinism) is considered a decadent offshoot of Petrarchism, while in England and America the emphasis falls on Donne's anti-Petrarchism.

The pre-secentisti anticipate that element of Donne's anti-Petrarchism which is not an attack upon the convention, but simply a non-observance of Neo-Platonic and chivalric limitations.

15 The research, the results of which are published here, was financed in part by a Rutgers Research Grant.