Sidney and Petrarch; Or, The Contemplation of Love :: Renaissance European History Essays

Sidney and Petrarch Or, The Contemplation of LoveTanto piu di voi, quando piu vama. Petrarca. The Renaissance reached its utmost in the sixteenth deoxycytidine monophosphate. side of meat, long neglected by the humanists preoccupation with classic and Latin, rose to a wholly new and conscious dignity as a medium of serious literary expression. That English should rise and meet the status of national language is not surprising in cod of the fact that the spread of literacy and the introduction of printing, along with the increasingly strong patriot feeling, did account for its consolidation.1 There was not only a steady attainment towards developing a language of their stimulate English humanists also tangle a peremptory need for constructing and shaping literary modes which were akin to their own prepare of values and culture. As The Norton Anthology of English Literatures introduction to the sixteenth century puts it Literary conventions challenged Elizabetha n poets to find fit forms for their experiences, to show their learning and virtuosity by the ingenious elaboration of ... well-known patterns, and to create from these patterns something fresh and new.2 Be it a pastoral poem or a sonnet, the Elizabethan poet would set come to the fore to follow the path of ingenious invention. He would sometimes draw on the conventions and modes of the classics or, as the case may be, he could also seek out to emulate the patterns of foreign poets (mainly Italian and French), in order to recreate their poetical utterances. In Phillip Sidneys sonnets, for instance, the old Petrarchan rhetoric is still at work. Sidneys Astrophel and Stella is the first of the spacious sonnet cycles, which drew heavily upon the conventions established by Petrarch. The Cambridge History of English Literature says Some of Watsons successors were gifted with poetic powers to which he was a stranger, and interwove the borrowed conceits with individuali st feeling, which, at times, lifted their verse to the plane of genuine poetry.3 The book of facts could be taken as an accurate reflection on Sidneys poetry, for he really undertook to work upon the already established literary modes and, by so doing, he did succeed in creating poetry of his own. For Sidney, thus, the Petrarchan conventions had to take on a wholly new meaning, if his poetry was to be both genuine and unique.