CHAPTER ONE

A History of Concepts

Lyric and Poetry in Modern Genre Theory

Between roughly 1550 and 1800, the concept of poetry underwent a profound metamorphosis, comparable in intensity to the transformation in the writing of poetry that took place between the time of Charles Baudelaire and the time of the historical avant-gardes. This change represents both the beginning of modern poetry and the necessary conditions for poetry’s entrance into the modern epoch of its history. Five centuries ago, the ideas many people use today to describe this genre were literally inexpressible. Three centuries ago, they were endorsed by only a minority of specialist readers, starting with the most significant one: that poetry corresponds for the most part with the lyric, viewed as a genre in which a first person speaks about itself in a style intended to be personal. This conflation of attributes, a foregone conclusion in the eyes of many today, rests on assumptions that are anything but to be taken for granted. The most important is a notion of the lyric that differs from the etymological meaning of the word.

In ancient culture, the lyric was a poem sung to the sound of a lyre. By metonymy, it was a poem intended to be read silently but whose subject matters and meters drew on the tradition of poetry accompanied by string instruments. In our culture, the lyric is one of the three major theoretical families into which literature is divided. It groups together texts in which a first-person speaker expresses content considered to be personal: individual passions, states of mind, reflections. This modern concept has an origin and a history: it is actually contemporary to the division of literature into three theoretical groupings that emerged around 1550 and became established between approximately 1750 and 1850. In only a few decades, it replaced the divisions that came into existence in classical antiquity but were still alive in eighteenth-century classicism, and it spread throughout Europe in countless variants that had different nuances but were similar in substance. The systematic version of this schema can be read in Hegel’s Aesthetics. Literature is composed of three major genres: epic (or narrative), lyric, and drama. Epic “presents what is itself objective in its objectivity”; lyric gives voice to “the subject, the inner world, the mind that considers and feels, that instead of proceeding to action, remains alone with itself as inwardness, and that therefore can take as its sole form and final aim the self-expression (das Sichaussprechen) of the subjective life”; drama unites the characteristics of epic and lyric “into a new whole in which we see in front of us both an objective development and also its origin in the hearts of individuals.”¹

This three-part schema has become common knowledge. You understand this when you look at the categories found in twentieth-century criticism, categories coming out of critical writings as well as those crystallized in institutions.² Histories of literature organized by genre are often divided into three groupings: narrative, poetry, and theater, sometimes with the addition of a fourth, which collects forms that lie outside the literature of invention in its narrowest sense, what for some time has been referred to as nonfiction. In the public stacks of the largest library in the European Union, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, literary criticism is divided into writings on poetry, the novel, and theater; on the shelves of many mainstream bookstores, the only theoretical genre that deserves to be broken down into subgenres is narrative, whereas writings in verse and for the stage are normally stacked on small shelves under signs saying “poetry” and “theater.” In all these cases, the archetype to which these taxonomies refer unconsciously is the Romantic theory of literary genres. In lyric, an I speaks to itself in the first person, focusing the reader’s interest not on the objective interest of the experiences described but on the way of describing them and on the significance that these experiences have for the speaker. In drama, many first-person voices speak and act within the public space of the stage. In narrative, the narrator’s persona recounts the words, thoughts, and actions of a number of characters, or its own as a character, focusing the reader’s attention on the intrinsic interest of the things recounted rather than on the way they are told. This schema does not change for a story told in the first person, because there is usually a logical and chronological distance between the narrating I and the narrated I, a distance comparable to that separating the narrator and the hero in a third-person story. Obviously, as Goethe points out, theoretical categories do not coincide perfectly with historical genres or real works:

These three modes of poetry can work together or separately. They can often be found jointly even in the shortest poem, and precisely through this compression into the smallest space they engender the most admirable creations, as we can notice clearly in the ballads of all nations. In early Greek tragedy we see all three of them united as equals, and only after a certain period of time do they separate. So long as the chorus plays the primary role, lyricism ranks at the top. When the chorus becomes more of a spectator, the other two become more prominent. Finally, when the action is reduced to personal and domestic life, the chorus is felt to be unwieldy and burdensome.³

Following Goethe’s reasoning, we might say that The Cantos by Pound, Le ceneri di Gramsci by Pasolini, and “The Glass Essay” by Carson mix lyrical and narrative elements, that Bertolt Brecht’s theater superimposes epic forms on top of dramatic forms, and that first-person novels based on style cast a lyrical patina over the epic subject matter of the story. Although theoretical categories do not correspond to historical genres, there do exist empirical forms that almost match the ideal archetype: ones that are almost entirely narrative, dramatic, or lyrical, as Goethe viewed the “purely epic” poetry of Homer.⁴ A Greek epos is almost always narrative: the interest falls on the doings of the heroes and not on the bard’s style, which transcends the personal; a fully dramatic text for the theater is one that succeeds in creating a perfect mimetic illusion according to the convention of the fourth wall; a lyric poem is one in which a first person speaks about itself in a strongly distinctive style.

Some consider this division to be immanent to the logic of literature, in part, perhaps, because this theory of the three genres appears to have deep linguistic roots. These are the same roots from which the system of personal pronouns arose, following the tripartite schema of I-you-he / her / it in every language, almost as if it mirrored the elementary anthropological structures of identity and otherness.⁵ We find the same patterns again in the three major groupings of lyric, drama, and narrative, oriented respectively toward the first, second, and third persons.⁶ The history of literature shows us instead that the modern triad actually has a specific genealogy: it did not exist before the Romantic age, and even when it began to exist in embryonic form, it had a minor status compared to another way of dividing up the literary space. This latter way was much more ancient, much more illustrious, and utterly impossible to reconcile with the genre of the lyric.⁷

Lyric and Poetry in Ancient Poetics

There are three theoretical genres in the fundamental texts of ancient poetics too—Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Poetics—but the distinguishing criterion they use is completely different from the one employed by the Romantics. According to Plato, everything said by poets or storytellers is a story, and the story can be told using simple narrative (aple diegesis), imitation (mimesis), or both together. In pure narrative, poets speak in the first person; in the imitative form, they reproduce the characters’ speeches; and in the mixed form, they alternate between their own speech and the speeches of the characters.⁸ Tragedy and comedy are imitative, because the speeches are made directly by the characters without any mediation on the part of the narrator. Epic poetry is instead a mixed genre, because the narrator’s speeches alternate with those of the characters. Only dithyrambs are pure story:

One kind of poetry and story-telling employs only imitation—tragedy and comedy.… Another kind employs only narration by the poet himself—you find this most of all in dithyrambs. A third kind uses both—as in epic poetry and many other places.⁹

Thought on genres becomes more complex in Aristotle’s Poetics, because he brings variables into play that Plato had not considered. Seeing that art is mimesis, there are three criteria for classifying works: the media used to imitate, the objects imitated, and the mode or manner of imitation.¹⁰ The first distinguishes poetry from music and painting, and imitation in verse from imitation in prose; the second organizes works by subject matter, since imitators can represent the actions of people who are better than us, just like us, or worse than us; the third separates dramatic works from narrative and mixed works, because the poet can imitate by speaking directly, by giving voice to the characters, or by alternating the two techniques.¹¹ Aristotle basically picks up on Plato’s groupings, divides the space of literary imitation into two big theoretical genres, and leaves a third possibility in the middle, which arises out of the intersection of the two ideal types. Both authors classify poetic works by looking at a formal difference, on the basis of a very simple question that can be answered only with objective responses: “Who is speaking in the text?” There are only three possible cases: either the narrator speaks alone, the characters speak alone, or both the narrator and the characters speak. The crucial difference seems to lie in how much imitative capacity each kind has: dramatic poetry has the most mimetic power, because it allows the characters to speak and act without mediation; the purely diegetic forms have the least, because they represent reality through the narrator’s mediation; and the mixed kinds, which alternate the previous two, stand somewhere in between. Since public life and theater have the same nature—both consist of actions and speeches—stage art is able to arrive at a pure illusion of reality, whereas diegesis is forced to translate the characters’ speeches and actions out of the original medium and into another, allowing the narrator’s speech to intervene.

This schema, widely predominant in the poetics of antiquity¹² and the culture of the Latin Middle Ages,¹³ precludes any concept of the lyric as we understand it now, after Romanticism. As a matter of fact, if we accept the mode of speech as the only distinctive feature, then epic and lyric poetry are virtually indistinguishable. Indeed, Plato’s examples of pure narrative include a passage from the Iliad and dithyrambs,¹⁴ while Diomedes, who reworked Plato’s concepts more than seven centuries later, cites Lucretius’s De rerum natura as an example of perfect diegesis and the poetry of Archilochus and Horace as examples of the mixed genre.¹⁵ This wavering is justified, because if we look at the bare structure of the discourse—if we stick to the question “who is speaking?”—lyric and narrative as we understand them today are bound to be confused, since both in dithyrambs and in De rerum natura only a single voice speaks.

And yet modern literary perception picks up on a difference, one so deeply seated that it is difficult to define. It is a difference in content, but less obvious than how it appears at first glance. Clearly, the story Virgil tells in the Aeneid is not autobiographical, and when Horace addresses Maecenas in the Odes he does so to talk about himself. But equally clearly, there are many examples of autobiographical poetry that take a narrative slant. The distinction seems to reside less in the choice of subject matter than in the intention of the speech: the voice in the Aeneid, we might say, is intended to raise interest in an event outside the speaker, whereas the voice in the Odes seeks to focus attention on a personal experience. In other words, narrative “presents what is itself objective in its objectivity,” whereas lyric expresses “the inner world, the mind that considers and feels.”¹⁶ This reasoning is asymmetrical, though: the difference between epic and drama is irrefutable and rooted in the structure of the discourse, but the same can hardly be said for the difference between epic and lyric. The genre system from the Romantic and modern periods superimposes two different variables: in tracing out the boundary between dramatic and nondramatic texts it uses formal criteria inherent in the structure of discourse and implicit in the question “who is speaking?”; but in distinguishing between lyric and narrative, it follows a distinction based more on the content than on the form of the speech. For the core meaning of certain poems to be important to us, we must believe, first of all, that it does not lie in the story being told per se but in the relationship between the content and the inner life of the literary persona who says I in the text. The lyric is therefore a genre in which the narration of events about a first person (anecdotes, passions, thoughts, spontaneous reflections) is combined with a style constructed to focus attention on the speaker that expresses itself in the text. It is a genre in which a first person talks about itself in a personal way, so that the “core” of the work is not “the occurrence itself but the state of mind which is mirrored in it.”¹⁷ For modern aesthetics and for our reading habits, “autobiography,” “self-expression,” and “subjectivity” are everyday ideas. For ancient poetics, which revolved around the idea that poetry was a mimesis of actions performed according to a certain collective ritual, the speech of someone who narrates “what is itself objective in its objectivity”¹⁸ and the speech of someone who talks about the external world but in reality wants to give voice to his or her inner world are practically indistinguishable. Indeed, ancient Greek and Latin culture had no knowledge of the modern notion of lyric poetry.

Alexandrian, Latin, and Medieval Categories

The word lyrikoi appears in Alexandrian times, between the third and second centuries BCE, to refer to the nine poets who make up the canon of ancient lyric poets: Alcman, Sappho, Alcaeus, Stesichorus, Ibycus, Anacreon, Simonides, Pindar, and Bacchylides. Initially used to define the authors of the corpus of works called melike poiesis, after the canon of the nine was established the term gradually replaced the more ancient melopoios. From the first century BCE on, the work of the lyrikoi began to be called lyrike poiesis, “poetry sung to the sound of the lyre.”¹⁹ Although the ancient poets never named their genre, Plato’s dialogs contain many references to the melopoioi and to the class of texts called melon poiesis, or more often melos and mele.²⁰ In a passage of his Laws, we find a list of lyric subgenres: hymns, paeans, threnoi, dithyrambs, nomoi.²¹ From the terms used, we understand that the feature shared by melos is an association with music, song, and dance; and that the division into subgenres follows very different boundaries from the current ones in our modern aesthetic vocabulary, seeing that they refer to public, social, and objective distinctions: the purpose of the discourse, the divinity to which the text was dedicated, the meter, the choreography, the dialect, and the type of music.²²

The first to give a theoretical status to the ancient categories were the Hellenist grammarians and philologists of Alexandria, who established canons, consecrated models, and flattened out differences. A significant trace of this gigantic organizational effort has remained in a passage of Photios’s Bibliotheca (855), which summarizes the taxonomies introduced in the Chrestomathy of Eutychius Proclus, a grammarian from the second century CE. Proclus, in his turn, refers to a more ancient theory, whose original source was Didymus’s treatise Peri lyrikon poieton (On Lyric Poets).²³ Taking up Plato’s and Aristotle’s theoretical divisions, the Chrestomathy separates poetry into diegetic (diegematikon) and imitative (mimetikon), placing theater types into this latter group (tragedy, satiric drama, and comedy), and epic, iambic, elegiac, and melic poetry into the former. Within melic poetry, two families of subgenres can be distinguished, sorted by subject matter: compositions dedicated to the gods and compositions dedicated to humans. Although this is a uniform category, the poet’s subjectivity is certainly not what holds it together: for Proclus, melic, iambic, and elegiac poetry are in any case three different modes, based on the same distinction used in Hellenistic canons.

The work of the Alexandrian philologists, which was passed on to the Latin, medieval, and Renaissance cultures, created a rigid separation between poetic subgenres that, from Romanticism on, would become part of a single, large, unified grouping. In time, other taxonomies would be added to the Alexandrian ones, but they would not change the structure of a system that remained in place until the second half of the eighteenth century. Today we see no significant difference between letters in verse by John Donne, John Keats, or Leopardi and their other subjective poetry: we perceive a fluctuation in tone, in subgenre, but we do not view it as significant enough to shatter the wider unity of the lyric genre understood in a broad, that is, modern sense. Conversely, ancient poetics recognized no higher principle linking these texts, which were almost always short and in verse, and in which a speaker expressed content that today we would call private. In the literary system of antiquity, a letter in verse and a lyric poem in the narrow sense are different types of compositions. While today we can interpret ancient Greek and Latin texts in light of the modern concept of lyric and search for signs of self-expression in the melic, elegiac, and iambic compositions of classical literature,²⁴ classical culture itself never arrived at the idea that a literary genre could hold together on the basis of the subject’s self-expression.²⁵

Between the first century BCE and the first century CE, Latin literature gave new life to the forms of short poetry inherited from Greek culture, but the poetics remained faithful to the Hellenistic partitions:²⁶ Catullus, Tibullus, Horace, and Ovid organized their compositions to respect the divisions into subgenres. Without entering into the debate on Catullus’s Liber (whether the collection was put together by him or assembled after his death), it is clear that its structure does not follow the story of a life or a love but, rather, an alternation of meters. Similarly, Horace’s Epodes, Odes, Satires, and Letters, or Ovid’s Amores, Tristia, and Epistulae ex Ponto belong to different genres. When it came to classifying texts, the differences in meter and subject matter counted for more than the identity of the authorial speaker.

At the end of the first century CE, in a representative, canonic work such as Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria the architecture of literary forms was still identical to the Alexandrian system. In presenting literary genres to orators, Quintilian names epic, elegiac, and iambic poetry, lyric, satire, comedy, New Comedy, tragedy, history, oratory, and philosophy. He describes them as if they were separate forms, each with its own rules and models.²⁷ A passage from Tacitus’s Dialogus de oratoribus (A Dialogue on Oratory) is helpful for understanding how the different kinds of short poetry were perceived:

For my part I hold all eloquence in its every variety something sacred and venerable, and I regard as preferable to all studies of other arts not merely your tragedian’s buskin or the measures of heroic verse, but even the sweetness of the lyric ode, the lasciviousness of the elegy, the satire of the iambic, the wit of the epigram, and indeed any other form of eloquence.²⁸

Each kind corresponds to a specific attitude: lyric poetry is sweet, elegies are lascivious because they talk about love, iambic poets are sarcastic, and epigram writers are witty. In the first century CE, the idea that these subgenres might all be part of the same genre appears to be unthinkable.

A unified class of lyric poetry was missing from the taxonomies of the philologists and the philosophers. Moreover, the categories of the philologists were perfectly integrated with those of the philosophers: in his Chrestomathy, Proclus traces the swarm of small Hellenistic genres back to the large unifying schemas of Plato and Aristotle. This interweaving of differing but compatible criteria went on for a long time. We find it in a text that was crucial in transmitting the Platonic and Aristotelian taxonomy to medieval culture: Diomedes’s Ars grammatica, written most likely in the second half of the fourth century. According to Diomedes, there are three major genres: the genus activum or imitativum (also called dramaticon or mimeticon), in which the poet allows the dramatis personae to speak in their own voices; the genus enarrativum or enuntiativum (exegeticon or apangelticon), in which only the poet talks; and the genus commune or mixtum (koinon or mikton), in which both the poet and the characters talk. The genus imitativum includes tragedies and comedies but also Virgil’s first and ninth eclogues. The genus enarrativum includes book one, book three, and the first part of book four of Virgil’s Georgics, and Lucretius’s De rerum natura. There are two varieties of the genus commune: the heroica species, which includes the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the lyrica species, which includes the poetry of Archilochus and Horace.²⁹ Like Proclus, Diomedes also superimposes Plato’s and Aristotle’s theoretical frameworks onto the Alexandrian philological schema; and he too has no words for conceiving of something that approaches the idea of modern lyric poetry.

When the concepts of classical poetics diffused into medieval culture, they did so chaotically and in fragments. “The antique system of poetic genres had, in the millennium before Dante, disintegrated until it was unrecognizable and incomprehensible;”³⁰ medieval poetics and rhetoric used the classical groupings confusedly, making use of a mutable literary vocabulary.³¹ The Platonic and Aristotelian taxonomy managed to make it through the Middle Ages thanks to the mediation of Diomedes: the distinction between narrative, dramatic, and mixed forms appears in the Venerable Bede as well as in John of Garland.³² The categories they commonly use to classify the poetry we today call lyric are based on meters (the ballad, sonnet, canzone) or subjects (the aubade, the chanson d’ami, the chanson de croisade)—categories that we are able to group into a logical typology only after the fact.³³ What remains unchanged with respect to the taxonomies of antiquity is the criterion used for classification, because medieval poetics and rhetoric also divide up writing in verse by examining variables that are public and objective (the topic, the kind of meter, the purpose of the discourse). As earlier in the Latin culture of the first century BCE, the renewal of lyric forms in the vernacular literatures of the Middle Ages did not give rise to a corresponding renewal in theoretical thought.

This disintegration continued long after Dante’s time, for at least two centuries. If we look at the history of concepts, the rhetoric and poetics of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance add little of substance to the ideas that European literature had inherited from classical antiquity.³⁴ The notion of lyric poetry remained tied to Horace, whom Petrarch, in one of his Familiares, crowns king of this genre,³⁵ and whose fame spread between the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth century, thanks to the edito princeps of 1471–1472 and the Florentine edition of 1482, edited by Cristoforo Landino.³⁶ A coherent, philosophical, and innovative discussion would not resurge until the second half of the sixteenth century, when Francesco Robortello’s commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics (1548) ushered in a new age in the history of literary theory and discussion on poetic forms.

The Renaissance Breakthrough

The integrated category of lyric poetry and the modern system of literary genres became established only around the mid-sixteenth century. The first writer to introduce them clearly was Antonio Minturno in his treatises De poeta (1559) and L’arte poetica (1563). Minturno proposes to divide what at the time was called poetry (and which, starting from the second half of the eighteenth century, would be called literature) into three major classes—epic, scenic, and melic (or lyric)—and to regard all other kinds as subgenres of these three main groups. The idea that compositions in verse on a subjective matter could belong to a large unified genre predated him by a few decades, but it had never been presented with such clarity.³⁷ In the second half of the sixteenth century, the idea quickly became a topos: it can be found in Giovan Battista Pigna’s Poetica horatiana (1561), in “Lezioni intorno alla poesia” (Lectures on Poetry) by Angelo Segni (1573), in a lecture by Giulio Del Bene (1574), in a letter by Filippo Sassetti to Giovan Battista Strozzi (1574), and in De poetica by Giovanni Antonio Viperano (1579).³⁸ In 1594, Pomponio Torelli, a former pupil of Robortello, dedicated an entire treatise to lyric poetry and considered it a unified genre in which the odes of Pindar and Horace were able to coexist with Catullus’s Liber, iambic poetry, and Petrarch’s Canzoniere.³⁹ In 1599, forty years after Minturno’s De poeta, this is how Alessandro Guarini summarized the system of literary genres that the Italian literary theorists of the late sixteenth century had created:

There are three (leaving aside for now the other more subtle divisions, which have little relevance for our topic), as I was saying, three main kinds of poetry, to which all the others are reduced. Epic is one, Dramatic is another, which branches off into Tragic and Comic, and, finally, Lyric is the third, under which the ancient Greeks and Latins collected together Hymns, Encomiums, Elegies, Odes, Distiches, and Epigrams.⁴⁰

The new category spread well beyond treatises on lyric poetry, as becomes evident when reading texts that take the tripartite division of literary genres for granted, only mentioning lyric poetry in passing. This occurs in Tasso’s “Discorsi dell’arte poetica” (“Discourses on the Art of Poetry”), written in the early 1560s, and in one of the most important literary treatises of Renaissance culture, Lodovico Castelvetro’s Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta (1570, Aristotle’s Poetics Translated in the Vulgar Language and Commented On). Tasso compares the style of the lyric poet to that of the heroic poet and the tragic poet;⁴¹ Castelvetro first deduces an exceedingly complicated taxonomy of genres from Aristotle that leaves no place for lyric poetry, but he then observes that “generally speaking, we divide all poems into four parts: and under the first we place comedy, under the second, epic, under the third, tragedy, under the fourth, odes, epigrams, elegies, canzoni, and short poems of the like.”⁴²

Literary theory in the late sixteenth century is rigidly prescriptive: a text that fails to obey the rules is ipso facto considered imperfect and excluded from the canon; a genre that lacks precedents or legitimization is judged “minor poetry.” Norms are inferred from the canonical texts of ancient poetics, especially Aristotle’s Poetics, but also from Horace’s letter on the art of poetry and, to a lesser extent, from Plato’s Republic. Efforts are made to interpret Plato, Aristotle, and Horace as parts of a coherent system, blurring contradictions that appear blatant today.⁴³ Minturno’s modern tripartite division arises out of a very liberal interpretation of an Aristotelian criterion, that is, his analysis of the means a poet uses to imitate. Epic poetry, writes Minturno, only requires speech, whereas scenic poetry uses theatrical representation, and lyric poetry uses speech accompanied by dance and song.⁴⁴ According to this schema, modern poetic forms like sonnets, ballads, canzoni, and madrigals represent the theoretical continuation of the ancient melos and are accordingly justified by the classic authorities.⁴⁵ The problem is that this reference to music did not take into account the concept of lyric poetry that Italian literati possessed in the mid-sixteenth century, when the majority of poems were written for silent reading, nor, most importantly, the work to which everyone looked to define the essence of this class of texts grouped together under the name of lyric poetry: Petrarch’s Canzoniere.

Minturno mentions another characteristic shared by the texts collected under the name of melic or lyric, namely, the weight that the “affections of the soul”⁴⁶ have in these poems. This idea was well received and quickly became a commonplace, but it broke with some of the assumptions of classicist poetics. The canonical texts of ancient literary theory opposed three types of difficulties to the idea that lyric poetry gave voice to first-person affections. One is explicit: in a passage from Aristotle’s Poetics, we read that whoever speaks in first person is not a true imitator: “the poet must speak as little as possible in his own name because otherwise he is not imitating.”⁴⁷ In the second place, the literary system of antiquity insisted on differences, not similarities, between short poetic compositions: the ode, epigram, elegy, satire, iambic poetry, and epigram are different genres, and this made it difficult to think about the lyric as a unified genre. Finally, for Plato and Aristotle, the subject of mimesis is visible actions, acts that take place in the public space, not “affections of the soul.” The sixth chapter of the Poetics, on tragedy, is quite clear on this point: the specific task of poetry is to represent what people do and say in the external world; true mimesis has as its object actions and not characters; the poet’s purpose is to create a mythos, a plot, and not a static description of what we moderns would call the inner life. Why did the Italian theorists of the late sixteenth century, who were firm classicists and commentators of Aristotle, introduce a new and unprecedented system of genres by inventing a tripartite division of poetry into epic, lyric, and drama, conceiving of a large unified genre, and going against what was written in the theoretical works they admired?

The text that grasps and illustrates with lucidity the problem at the base of this tacit theoretical revolution is Segni’s “Lezioni intorno alla poesia.” The Florentine Academy regularly invited well-known men of letters to give lectures and during their series they were asked to comment on a few poems by Petrarch. Starting from the text of Canzone 127, “In quella parte ove Amor mi sprona” (“In that direction which love urges me”), Segni embarks on a reflection on the nature of poetry, recalling the principles of Aristotle and, above all, Plato. However, he soon finds himself up against a serious theoretical obstacle: in some passages of Republic and Poetics we read that “when a poet speaks in his own person, he is not an imitator”; in other words, authentic mimesis is irreconcilable with autobiographical discourse. If we took this as literally true, we would arrive at an untenable conclusion, namely, that Petrarch could not be a true poet:

there would be many … from whom we would have to remove the title of poet held until now, and our Petrarch, the greatest to possess this name, would be chased out and driven from many, almost all parts, and would take refuge most wretchedly in a very cramped place, where on occasion he makes speak either Love or his lady’s companions or certain birds he has caught and sent to be presented to I-don’t-know-whom.⁴⁸

Segni expertly grasps the problem that others also perceive but fail to express clearly. Italian literature written in the vernacular arose out of the unquestionable authority of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, but the Canzoniere is hard put to stay inside the categories of poetics inherited from the ancients if these categories are interpreted literally. Petrarch’s book contains texts that a literal interpretation of Plato and Aristotle would exclude from the roster of poetry and that had no precedents in ancient literature. The Canzoniere is not bound together by meter, because it uses different measures; it is not a simple collection of love poems, because it includes texts on political, moral, and religious topics; it cannot be interpreted as a series of dramatic monologs spoken by a character or by a series of characters, because this is not the meaning of the work, as Segni states clearly. The core of the book and its unifying principle is the inner story of the character who says I.⁴⁹ There was the risk of a conflict between the theories and models inherited from the ancients and the cornerstone of Italian vernacular literature in the sixteenth century, the most canonic and imitated work of the time, which was changing the idea of subjective poetry in Europe thanks to the international success of Petrarchism.⁵⁰ Either Plato and Aristotle were wrong when they talked about the nature of poetry (and for a classicist of the time this was unacceptable) or Petrarch was not a true poet, because his work did not correspond to the idea of poetry established by the ancients (and this too was unacceptable).

The modern category of the lyric was born, therefore, as a compromise formation to resolve a conflict between auctoritates and canons. There had to be a way to reconcile two absolute models while staying faithful to the vocabulary of Plato, Aristotle, and Horace but diverging from some of their conclusions. If it had been a matter of a less important work, the Italian literati would certainly have expelled it from the canon, but Petrarch’s authority was so unquestionable that it demanded a compromise, and that compromise was the invention of lyric poetry in the modern sense—as a unified genre at the same level as narrative and drama. This idea, completely foreign to Greek and Latin culture, owes its origin to the importance that Petrarch had in Italian vernacular literature.⁵¹

How could the Canzoniere be made to fit the rules? The first obstacle the ancients erected against the modern concept of lyric was easily surmounted: the passages in Republic and Poetics that deny the title of imitator to poets who speak in first person could simply be juxtaposed with other passages from the same texts that argue the opposite.⁵² It was more difficult to counter the classical theory of genres, which is decidedly hostile to a work that allows different meters and subjects to coexist and whose overall unity is enforced purely by the unity of a first person that says I. The Renaissance men of letters tried to give completely new meanings to the ancient categories, almost to the point of distorting the evidence. When Guarini writes that the Greeks and Latins put hymns, encomiums, elegies, odes, distiches, and epigrams into the category of lyric poetry, he is unaware of the fact, or pretends not to know, that ancient poetics never included elegies and epigrams in the same class as the ode, which was the genre of lyric poetry in the strictest sense.⁵³ The third was the most difficult obstacle though. While it may have sufficed to appeal to the spirit of the theory to argue that one can imitate even while speaking in the first person, it was hardly so easy to reconcile the modern idea of the lyric with the theory of poetry as mimesis of actions, which was the architrave of the system of concepts inherited from Greek and Latin culture:

This is where the doubt arises. Whether the Sonnet and other lyric compositions are worthy of the name of Poetry, and whether the Composer of lyrical things can rightly be called a Poet. Nor should our doubting appear strange to you, because it is a matter of men of letters, with solid reputations, who having made themselves the judges in this quarrel, have pronounced their judgments against lyric poets. First of all, then, it would seem that this could be denied, namely, that the composer of things lyrical deserves the name of Poet, because of two fundamentals, taken from Aristotle’s doctrine in Poetics. The first is that every poem is a likeness (rassomiglianza), or imitation, we mean. The second, that a Poet is a poet because of the plot (favola). These principles have such force that anything that does not create a likeness and does not imitate will not be poetry, and anyone who is not a composer of plots will not be called a poet.… Now, if imitation makes the poetry, and plot makes the poet, how can lyrical composers and compositions be poetry and poets, since poets do not fashion a plot, nor is imitation to be found in poetry?⁵⁴

Although Aristotle’s Poetics states clearly that poetry is mimesis by virtue of what Guarini calls favola, Aristotle calls mythos, and moderns call “plot,” lyric poems that narrate a plot are few and far between—hence the doubt about whether the new genre is “worthy of the name of Poetry” and deserves a place alongside epic and tragedy as a canonic and perfect form.

The most common way of getting around a literal interpretation of Aristotle was to argue that the narration of actions is the species of a broader genre that encompasses the mimesis of affections, deeds, speeches, and things of the senses.⁵⁵ Epic poetry, tragedy, and comedy would represent human actions, and lyric poetry their passions, but the mimetic logic would be the same in each of the genres. Once this foothold is gained, it can be argued that the narration of a passion is organized in the form of mythos, as Minturno, Segni, Viperano, Torelli, and Guarini do.⁵⁶ Nevertheless, some lyric poems were so devoid of plot that, for some, the idea of “imitation of the passions” was not sufficient to reconcile the authority of the classics with that of Petrarch. To truly respond to the objections it was necessary to change the concepts and the words. This is what Tasso sought to do:⁵⁷

if we want to find some part in the lyric that corresponds proportionately to the plot in epics and tragedies, we cannot say there is anything apart from the concepts: because, just as affections and customs are based on plot, so the lyric is based on concepts.⁵⁸

For Tasso, the prime mover of the lyric is not the plot (favola) but the concepts (concetti), by which he means matters of the inner life.⁵⁹ A few years before Tasso, Giulio Cesare Scaligero had also defended a similar theory. In his opinion,

There are many kinds of odes and poems … lyrical, melic, paeans, elegies, epigrams, satires, silvae, epithalamiums, hymns, and others—in which there is no imitatio but just the bare narration (enarratio) or explanation (explicatio) of those affections that come from the mind (ingenium) itself of the person who sings, and not from the poetic character who is represented.⁶⁰

Filippo Sassetti also arrives at a similar conclusion in a letter he wrote in reply to Giovan Battista Strozzi. Strozzi had given a lecture at the Florentine Academy on the genre in which he excelled, the madrigal. He wanted to find titles of nobility for a poetic form that court audiences enjoyed but which orthodox classicists regarded as minor. Sassetti provides Strozzi with new arguments, following an original line of thought that was destined to become a topos. First of all, he considers the madrigal to be a wider species than the genre of lyric. Then, he criticizes the opinion of those who, when interpreting subjective poems according to the logic of mimesis, try to read them as stories or dramatic representations and consequently end up confusing particular cases with universal law. Madrigals do not imitate any discourse or action but, rather, present “the concepts of the person who composes them”:

[For some] it is enough that some madrigals imitate human actions and are dramatic and dramatized, but I reckon that they make up a small number. Consequently, saying that madrigals are an imitation of action would make as much sense as saying that wintertime is hot, just because there was nice weather one day. Now, if for this reason we cannot call them an imitation of actions—because for the most part they contain the concepts (concetti) of the person who composes them, sparked by matters of love or whatever other reason, or a description of a time and a land, which are also concepts we have in our mind of that thing—let us see if we can call them an imitation of concepts, which is what our imagination is.⁶¹

But even the expression “imitation of concepts” was not entirely convincing. The idea of imitation, writes Sassetti, presupposes a prior content to which the poet’s speech must adapt, while in the case of the lyric, this model does not exist—or, rather, it exists in the way that someone who writes or speaks about philosophy puts the concepts they have in their mind onto paper. Under such circumstances, Sassetti would not speak of imitation but of expression:

But saying what is true in this manner is to express the concepts of the mind and not to imitate them: … I would resolve this Platonic imitation in the peripatetic meaning or expression.⁶²

Whereas epic and dramatic poets represent an external event that exists before the representation, like an object that stands before a painter, the lyric poet expresses a content that is entirely within. The reflections of Scaligero, Tasso, and Sassetti contain the first traces of an idea that would become central in the Romantic age.

Classicist Resistance and National Differences

Between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, the division of poetry into epic, lyric, and dramatic spread throughout all the major European literatures. It was reintroduced, among others, by John Milton in his treatise Of Education (1644), by John Dryden in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), by Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni in his Istoria della volgar poesia (1698, History of Vernacular Poetry), by Gian Vincenzo Gravina in his Della ragion poetica (1708, On Poetical Reason), by Antoine Houdar de La Motte in his Réflexions sur la critique (1716, Reflections on Criticism), and by Alexander Baumgarten in his Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (1735, Reflections on Poetry). This theory of lyric poetry as the expression of concepts was taken up and expanded by Francisco Cascales in his Tablas poéticas (1617, Poetic Tables) and in Cartas filológicas (1634, Philological Letters).⁶³ Nevertheless, the modern triad never entered common usage and for almost two centuries continued to clash with the more widespread and considerably more authoritative taxonomies of antiquity, which denied lyric the rank of major theoretical genre and continued to segment it into subgenres based on meter and subject matter. The only composition with undisputed prestige in this congeries of scattered forms, the only one considered worthy of being called lyric, was the Pindaric and Horatian ode. The other subgenres were treated separately, relegated to the lower ranks of the literary hierarchy and viewed as minor poetry.⁶⁴

The national culture of the interpreter also influenced which system predominated. Italians, for example, were inclined to put the lyric at the same level as the epos, tragedy, and comedy, whereas the French tended to separate the ode off from the other forms, which they grouped together under the vaguely disdainful category of petite poésie.⁶⁵ At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Eustachio Manfredi, a professor of mathematics at the University of Bologna, member of the Accademia della Crusca, and an Arcadian, lucidly formulated the terms of the problem in a letter to Marquis Giovan Gioseffo Orsi, author of Considerazioni sopra un famoso Libro Franzese intitolato: La Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit (1703, Considerations on a Famous French Book Titled: How to Think Clearly in Works of the Mind). The book was written to rebut Dominique Bouhours’s thesis that the only modern authors capable of rivaling the ancients were French.⁶⁶ Orsi’s Considerazioni sparked an enormous controversy; its traces remained in the second edition of the work (1706), which collected letters sent to Orsi from several authoritative readers, including Eustachio Manfredi. Bouhours shows that he does not know true Italian poetry, writes Manfredi: he gets steamed up about a group of minor poets but fails to cite Petrarch.⁶⁷ Bouhours’s attitude is actually typical, Manfredi continues: much of the French aversion to Italian poetry comes from the fact that literature beyond the Alps does not have an illustrious tradition of “serious lyrical compositions” (for Manfredi, Pierre de Ronsard is nothing but an imitator of Petrarch and Pietro Bembo).⁶⁸ It associates short poems with the comic-playful register; and it does not understand the greatness of serious lyric poetry written in the vernacular.⁶⁹ Italians, on the other hand, excel in lyrical love poems and heroic poems written in the high style, thanks to Petrarch and Gabriello Chiabrera, whereas the French language is better suited to the petite poésie of madrigals, canzonets, and epigrams.⁷⁰ Manfredi understood that some judgments depend on the role of the literary genres in their respective national canons: in Italy, the Canzoniere legitimated lyric poetry because, after Petrarch, Italians could have no doubt that subjective poetry in a serious style possessed a dignity equal to that of the great classicist genres; in France there had been no poet capable of giving the lyric the same prestige enjoyed by the epic, tragedy, and comedy.

The New Romantic Theory

The modern category of the lyric and the tripartite division into epic, lyric, and dramatic became established definitively in the second half of the eighteenth century along with the crisis in European classicism. We glimpse the first signs of the change in a chapter Charles Batteux dedicated to lyric poetry in Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un même principe (1746, The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle), one of the last great defenses of classicist poetry in the age of its decline.⁷¹ To demonstrate that every fine art is imitative, Batteux must refute several objections, one of which concerns the genre that many find to be incompatible with the principle of mimesis.⁷² In citing the opinion that he intends to criticize, Batteux sets out clearly the idea of poetry that was becoming established in the mid-eighteenth century and which Romanticism would lay claim to:

What! someone could immediately object: are the Songs of the Prophets, the Psalms of David, the Odes of Pindar and Horace not real poems? On the contrary, they are the most perfect. Let us go back to the origins of poetry. Isn’t poetry a song that arouses joy, appreciation, and gratitude? Isn’t it a cri du cœur or an expostulation, where nature does everything and art nothing? We see no pictures or depictions. In the beginning, lyric poetry amounted to passion, feeling, and intoxication. Two conclusions seem to follow from this: first, that lyric poems are real poems and, second, that these poems are not imitative.⁷³

According to this theory, which Abrams calls “expressive” and which he opposes to the aesthetic of mimesis, poetry is an “outpouring from the heart,” an immediate voice of feeling, and its original form is lyric poetry.⁷⁴ A few decades later, certain statements would become conventional wisdom; Batteux was still trying to refute them with Aristotelian arguments. If lyric poetry was the authentic expression of the poet rapt in an instant of enthusiasm, he writes, the feelings that we read in it would be real, but they would not necessarily be verisimilar. Consequently, they may be so narrowly tied to a particular circumstance that they would not be meaningful to everyone. The reason sacred poetry appears so beautiful to us is not because it records the real voice of the prophets, but because “we find perfectly expressed in them the feelings that it seems we would have experienced were we in the position of the prophets.”⁷⁵ These are verisimilar, typical, universally human feelings, which are therefore different from real ones, and this is exactly what goes on in tragedy, the archetypal genre of classicist aesthetics. In other words, Batteux is not ready to accept that lyric poetry is the self-expression of a real individual. This is why, resurrecting a two-hundred-year-old argument, he corrects Aristotle and falls back on the “imitation of the passions” idea, as had Minturno, Segni, Viperano, Torelli, and Guarini before him:

Therefore, just as actions and customs are imitated in epic and dramatic poetry, in lyric poetry we sing of imitated feelings or emotions. If it contains something real, this is mixed with something fictional in order to make a composite whole. The fictional embellishes the truth and the truth lends credibility to the fictional.⁷⁶

In the years to come, the expressive theory of poetry that Batteux sought unsuccessfully to reconcile with the principle of imitation would become a commonplace. Two decades later, when William Jones posed the same problems in his Essay on the Arts Commonly Called Imitative (1772), he arrived at a completely different result:

It is the fate of those maxims, which have been thrown out by very eminent writers, to be received implicitly by most of their followers, and to be repeated a thousand times, for no other reason, than because they once dropped from the pen of a superior genius: one of these is the assertion of Aristotle, that all poetry consists in imitation, which has been so frequently echoed from author to author, that it would seem a kind of arrogance to controvert it; for almost all the philosophers and criticks, who have written upon the subject of poetry, musick, and painting, how little forever they may agree in some points, seem of one mind in considering them as arts merely imitative: yet it must be clear to any one, who examines what passes in his own mind, that he is affected by the finest poems, pieces of musick, and pictures, upon a principle, which, whatever it be, is entirely distinct from imitation. M. le Batteux has attempted to prove that all the fine arts have a relation to this common principle of imitating: But, whatever be said of painting, it is probable, that poetry and musick had a nobler origin.⁷⁷

Music and poetry cannot be explained by imitation. In its original form, poetry is “a strong, and animated expression of the human passions.” Poetic meter and style are born from the passions: “if we observe the voice and accents of a person affected by any of the violent passions, we shall perceive something in them very nearly approaching to cadence and measure.”⁷⁸

Poetry does not imitate fictional affections but, rather, gives voice immediately to real feelings. It is “the language of the violent passions, expressed in exact measure, with strong accents and significant words.”⁷⁹ Jones arrives at these conclusions because, when he reflects on the essence of poetry in general, what comes to mind is almost always the lyric: the Psalms, the Greek, Arab, or Persian lyric poets, Petrarch. The Essay on the Arts Commonly Called Imitative overturns Aristotle’s theory, explicitly refutes Batteux, once more adopts the premises of expressive poetics, and shows the effects on literary criticism of primitivist theories on the origins of poetry, which Giambattista Vico and others had helped to popularize during the previous fifty years.⁸⁰

The corollaries of this theory form a constellation of ideas on which the most widespread version of Romanticism rests: originality, genius, the glorification of immediacy at the expense of rules, of individual talent at the expense of tradition, authenticity as the origin of art and as the criterion of judgment. In the late eighteenth century, these ideas and the tripartite division of literature into epic, lyric, and drama became topoi. Many began to invert the traditional hierarchy and put lyric in first place, inasmuch as it was the form of original poetry from which all the others were thought to derive, according to an idea that began to spread in the first half of the eighteenth century.⁸¹ While classicist poetics are suspicious of subjective poetry, Romanticism views it rather as the foundation of writing in verse. When Leopardi, half a century after William Jones, wrote that lyric is the “only primitive and true genre,”⁸² and that epic and drama are derivative forms, he was repeating a commonplace.

The Romantic paradigm consists of four essential elements.⁸³ In the first place, lyric poetry is no longer defined in relation to the principle of imitation practiced according to the rules but is instead the genre of self-expression and confession:

Petrarch was, certainly, too deeply affected with real grief … to imitate the passions of others.⁸⁴

The more he is a man of genius, the more he is a poet, the more he will have his own personal feelings to express, the more he will be averse to clothing another character, to speaking in the voice of another person, to imitating. The more he portrays himself and feels the need to do so, the more lyrical he is.⁸⁵

In the second place, the concept of the lyric spills out from its own sphere of relevance and becomes a general aesthetic category that can be applied to other forms as well. This is demonstrated from the late eighteenth century on by the dissemination of the neologism “lyricism” in English criticism, first appearing in 1760, and of “lyrisme” in French criticism, first appearing in 1829.⁸⁶ From that moment on, “lyric” can be anything that has to do with the expression of subjectivity: a lyrical novel, a lyrical drama, or a lyrical state of mind.

In the third place, lyric poetry eventually came to coincide with the idea of poetry itself. William Jones’s essay is very clear in this regard. Equally explicit is the entry for Lyrisch in the Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–1774, General Theory of Fine Arts), which Johann Georg Sulzer published in the same period as Jones’s Essay on the Arts Commonly Called Imitative.⁸⁷ In general, the Romantic theory of poetry favored a division of literary work that the novel was also pursuing, completely independently, during the same period. Prose was gradually becoming the natural medium of storytelling: in the long run, the tradition of the narrative poem, which was still very much alive during the nineteenth century, would not stand up to the challenge; at the same time, verse writing would become more and more specialized toward the lyrical. A corollary of this progressive differentiation was the idea that there exists a necessary relationship between poetry and brevity. In the Romantic era a topos began to circulate that poetry is by nature short, just as the rush of inspiration is brief, whereas long poetry written on the basis of an ordered plan is cold and artificial. Leopardi expresses it this way in his Zibaldone:

And in fact the epic poem is contrary to the nature of poetry. (1) It requires a plan which is conceived and arranged completely coldly. (2) How can a task requiring very many years of work have anything to with poetry? Poetry consists essentially in an impetus. It is also against nature absolutely. Impossible that imagination, the poetic vein, poetic spirits should endure, be sufficient, not diminish in so long a work on the same argument.… Virgil’s tiredness and strain in the last 6 books of the Aeneid is well known as well as apparent; they were written for a purpose, and not from an inner impulse or desire.… Works of poetry should by nature be short, as were all primitive poems (that is, the most poetic and true), of whatever kind, among all peoples.⁸⁸

A few decades later, in a peremptory and normative fashion, Edgar Allan Poe formulated this principle in two of his most famous essays, “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) and “The Poetic Principle” (1850):

What we term a long poem is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones—that is to say, of brief poetical effects. It is needless to demonstrate that a poem is such, only inasmuch as it intensely excites, by elevating, the soul; and all intense excitements are, through a psychal necessity, brief. For this reason, at least one half of the “Paradise Lost” is essentially prose—a succession of poetical depressions.⁸⁹

In regard to the Iliad, we have, if not positive proof, at least very good reason for believing it was intended as a series of lyrics; but, granting the epic intention, I can say only that the work is based on an imperfect sense of art. The modern epic is, of the supposititious ancient model, but an inconsiderate and blindfold imitation. But the day of these artistic anomalies is over. If, at any time, any very long poem were popular in reality, which I doubt, it is at least clear that no very long poem will ever be popular again.⁹⁰

“No very long poem will ever be popular again.” Poe is ahead of his times: in English literature, narrative poetry would be popular throughout the nineteenth century and remain so until the beginning of the twentieth. In the late 1920s, for example, Edwin Arlington Robinson and Stephen Vincent Benét would win the Pulitzer Prize with two long narrative poems, Tristram (1927) and John Brown’s Body (1928). And yet, in the long run, Poe was right: almost all long narrative poems have exited our canons. Narrative poems and didactic poetry have moved out to the periphery of the Western literary system, like a subterranean current that someone tries periodically, endemically, to bring back to light in order to counter the mainstream lyric.

In the fourth place, the Romantic theory reestablishes the relationship between poetry and style on new bases. It interprets the gap between the poetic text and degree-zero discourse not as the sign of a collective convention but as the effect of self-expression on form: the style of the poem expresses the inner world of the poet rather than faithfulness to a passed-down ritual. This always holds true, even when it is a matter of justifying the most artificial of poetry’s stylistic traits: meter. Here is how Hegel explains the difference between the meter of a kind of poetry that belongs to the communitarian past, such as epic, and the meter of lyric:

It is easy to see that the finest measure for the syllables in epic is the hexameter as it streams ahead uniformly, firmly, and yet also vividly. But for lyric we have to require at once the greatest variety of different meters and their more many-sided inner structure. The material of a lyric poem is not an object in its own appropriate objective development but the subjective movement of the poet’s own heart; and the uniformity or alteration of this movement, its restlessness or rest, its tranquil flow or foaming flood and fountains, must also be expressed as a temporal movement of word-sounds in which the poet’s inner life is made manifest.⁹¹

Meter is not a convention perpetuated out of habit or out of faithfulness to an ancient ritual; rather, like any other element of style, it expresses “the subjective movement of the poet’s own heart.”

The Modern Idea of Lyric Poetry

The idea of lyric that took root during the Romantic age is very different from the idea of lyric commonly held in ancient and classicist literature. The fundamental assumptions of the Romantic paradigm would have been questionable or incomprehensible before the long transformation that prevailed definitively only between the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth.

The most questionable premise is the close association between poetry and the author’s personal life. The Romantic doxa took it for granted that poets had to speak about their own experience and inner life; at the beginning of the nineteenth century an association of this sort was not yet obvious. There is a vast tradition of lyric poetry in the broadest sense in which a first person occupies the center of the discourse but as pure speaker, without talking about his or her own life, or without expressing thoughts and passions that bear any trace of a precise individuality. And there is a vast tradition of lyric poetry based on a generic speaker, “not a voice but voicing,” to use an expression from Jonathan Culler.⁹² A quick look through the most canonic and imitated lyrical text of the premodern period, Horace’s Odes, suffices to understand that expression of the self or of private anecdotes are not the only subjects of traditional lyric discourse, and perhaps not even its main themes. Similarly, when reading the Crestomazia poetica, the anthology that Leopardi put together with the aim of creating a collection of the best Italian poetry (excluding the great classics and contemporary living authors), one is struck by the number of lyric texts that are not autobiographical: little narrative scenes, descriptions of landscapes and cities, vocative poems, gnomic compositions, texts on political, philosophical, and moral issues framed from an almost impersonal point of view. Leopardi’s chrestomathy seems to contradict the Romantic poetics he was developing at that very time—or, rather, helps to historicize it. The association with subjectivity and brevity that Leopardi attributes to the nature of true poetry is in reality the result of a historical process, a long mutation.

In ancient poetics, when it came to identifying a text, the connection between subjectivity and lyric was less important than the public function of the work, its objective content, its meter, and, originally, the type of musical accompaniment. A song in honor of Dionysus and a song in honor of Apollo, a song dedicated to the winners of races and a song that celebrates weddings, a poem accompanied by the lyre and a poem accompanied by the flute, a poem written in iambics and a poem written in hexameters did not have the same name; nor did there exist a higher category under which to group the small, scattered forms into a large unified genre. The normative passages in Aristotle’s Poetics, which state that true imitation is the mimesis of actions and that the true poet should speak as little as possible in first person, are a sign of the difficulty inherent in classical antiquity of including in public discourse any ordinary person’s private life, considered too obscure, irrelevant, or incommunicable to be worthy of collective attention.

The history of genre categories provides the clearest demonstration of this lacuna. Even in epochs in which short forms developed with a first person that had an individual voice and talked about an individual matter, ancient poetics maintained unaltered the schemes serving to describe archaic Greek poetry. Short texts told by a first person fell under determinate subgenres because they versified a publicly recognizable subject matter (praise, satire, the pangs of love) in an appropriately corresponding form (sapphic stanza, iambics, hexameters, elegiac couplet). In other words, the text’s identity was not defined by its reference to a particular person’s story but by criteria that bore signs of the social function performed, in the present or past, by certain types of poetry. What matters was not “the self-expression of the subjective life,” as Hegel says, but the trace of its ritual function.

This schema, born to describe archaic Greek poetry, resisted the slide toward the private that poetry underwent during the Alexandrian age and later centuries. Even when compositions were no longer performed in public and accompanied by music, even when they left the realm of performance altogether, even when the speaker gave itself and the people it named an individual identity, even when it shifted the reader’s attention from the objective content of the discourse to the author’s private life, the categories inherited from the age when poetry was truly a social discourse lived on. It was not until the sixteenth century that the terms from the ancient taxonomy, by then inadequate for describing its objects, acquired other meanings. Two centuries after the appearance of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, Italian theorists acknowledged that the ancient categories did not explain the text that, for them, was the most important work of Italy’s vernacular literature and the most important book of lyric poetry that had been written since Horace’s Odes. What gives cohesiveness to such a work is the expanded space granted to the first person, or, in the language of the sixteenth-century theorists, to the imitation of the affections. Taking the Canzoniere as a model for the entire genre, it is possible to transform its egocentrism into a norm and find the same characteristics in every short composition scaffolded by an I. This was how a system of genres was born that shifted the axis of criteria from the public to the private, from the external to the internal, from objective content to subjective perception, and from ritual mimesis to self-expression.

The Concept of Modern Poetry

Along with the modern idea of the lyric, in the Romantic age a schema of literary history became popular that rediscovered two or three momentous fractures in the emergence of verse writing. Some literary historians settled for opposing ancient and classicist poetry to Romantic poetry; others turned to a three-part schema: a primitive age, when lyric was the spontaneous voice of the passions, was followed by a premodern age dominated by artifice, which lasted until the modern (that is, Romantic) writers recaptured the original spirit of lyric poetry. Although the idea of primitive poetry implicit in this arrangement would not have stood up to philological examination, almost all the national literary histories continued to accept the second part of this narrative. They dwelt at length on the metamorphosis of poetry between the second half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and reflected on the differences separating the earlier from the later: Thomas Gray from William Wordsworth, Albrecht von Haller from Friedrich Hölderlin, Voltaire from Victor Hugo, Giuseppe Parini from Giacomo Leopardi.

In English literature, one of the crucial texts that articulated and at the same time created this threshold was the preface Wordsworth wrote for the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, published for the first time in the 1800 edition and again, revised and expanded, in 1802. “All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” writes Wordsworth.⁹³ Although poetic discourse is tempered by contemplation, which reconstructs the emotion in a state of tranquility, it allows the rhythm of passion to come through and makes poetic style completely different from prose style. But verse writing had not always possessed these traits. The return to immediacy preached by Lyrical Ballads was in reality a revolution:

The earliest Poets of all nations generally wrote from passion excited by real events; they wrote naturally, and as men: feeling powerfully as they did, their language was daring and figurative. In succeeding times, Poets, and men ambitious of the fame of Poets, perceiving the influence of such language, and desirous of producing the same effect, without having the same animating passion, set themselves to a mechanical adoption of those figures of speech, and made use of them.⁹⁴

The spontaneous language of feeling was opposed in times of decadence to what Wordsworth calls poetic diction. These two codes differ from the prose of everyday language, but for opposite reasons: while primitive lyric poetry and the kind of lyric poetry Wordsworth would like to write both speak the language of “passion excited by real events,” poetic diction generates an artificial and mechanical style, an “adulterated phraseology,” chosen coldly and lacking any relation to true passions or to the natural way of saying things. This is the case for the classicist lyric poetry of the eighteenth century, which Wordsworth holds up as representative of premodern lyric poetry that came from imitating preexisting models, and which he criticizes roundly in a few passages of textual analysis.⁹⁵ When Wordsworth opposes the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” of new Romantic poetry to classicist poetic diction, he defines a decisive transition in an marvelously succinct way and also sets out a philosophy of literary history.

No text in the history of Italian literature had an influence and symbolic force comparable to that of Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads. Only slowly, over the course of the nineteenth century, did an awareness grow that Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi were a new kind of lyric poet and that their work marked a historical discontinuity. Francesco De Sanctis’s Storia della letteratura italiana (1870–1871) was a pivotal work.⁹⁶ In chapter 20, he talks about the passage from the “old literature,” superficial and stereotyped in content, decorative and conventional in form, servile and antipolitical in public life, to the “new literature,” announced by Melchiorre Cesarotti, Carlo Goldoni, Parini, and Vittorio Alfieri, and brought to perfection by Foscolo, Manzoni, and Leopardi.⁹⁷ For De Sanctis, the first great lyric voice of the new kind is Foscolo: in his Sonnets there reappears “that intimacy, sweet and melancholy, of which Italy had lost, as it seemed, the memory,” a prelude to the lyrical tone of Leopardi; Foscolo’s Dei sepolcri (1807, On Sepulchres) is the triumph of the spirit of the new poetry, the “affirmation of the new consciousness, the birth of the new man.”⁹⁸ Foscolo is the harbinger of new times for two reasons, says De Sanctis. The first is the content of his work: the speaker is “a real person,” not the conventional mask of Arcadian poetry but “a man in his integrity—in the active life as a patriot and citizen and in the intimacy of his private affections.”⁹⁹ The poetic subject and the biographical persona coincide, as if the distance between the speaker and the person who puts his name on the book were obliterated.

The second reason is the novelty of the style. Between Tasso and Metastasio, writes De Sanctis, poetry experienced a period of decadence. An eloquent sign of this crisis was the subordination of words to sounds in melodrama and poetry accompanied by music. For De Sanctis, when the word is subservient to sound it loses its importance; it ceases “to have a message, but acquires a value in its trills.”¹⁰⁰ Foscolo, on the contrary, removes all residue of eighteenth-century musicality and invents a new style that is assertive, because it says “things and not words,” and at the same time personal, because it avoids artifice and, with immediacy, expresses the “inner world of consciousness.”¹⁰¹ This is why he gradually abandons overly closed forms like the sonnet and the canzone, leaves off fixed rhyme, and chooses freer rhyme that is able to follow the “natural voice of the soul.”¹⁰²

Fifty years before De Sanctis, Leopardi had already provided an Italian version of the Romantic paradigm in his thoughts on literary genres, scattered throughout his Zibaldone. His theory of poetic forms changed radically between 1817 and 1826, following a path that, in retrospect, assumes an emblematic value. Until the mid-1820s, he did not view short poems on autobiographical subjects as a unified genre. Leopardi continued to use categories of classicist origin and distinguished between subgenres based on meter and theme, each different according to style and subject: canzoni, idylls, elegies, odes, epistles, and hymns.¹⁰³ The titles of his works faithfully reflect this sort of taxonomy: in 1824, his series Canzoni was published; between December 1825 and January 1826, his “Idilli” appeared serially in a literary magazine. In this phase, he used the category of lyric poetry in a narrow sense, to indicate the genre originated by Greek lyric poets and continued by Horace, Petrarch’s civil poems, and anyone who had written odes and canzoni about public issues.

Leopardi’s conversion to the Romantic theory of genres appears on a famous page of the Zibaldone, dated December 15, 1826:

Poetry can be divided, in substance, into only three real, principal kinds: lyric, epic, and dramatic. Lyric poetry is the firstborn of all; it is to be found in every nation, including savage ones; it is more noble and more poetic than every other kind; it is true and pure poetry in its every form; it is to be found in anyone, whether cultured or not, who seeks recreation or consolation in song and with words measured in whatsoever way, and with harmony; it is a free and straightforward expression of any living and deeply held human feeling. The epic was created after this, and from it. In a certain way, it is no more than an extension of lyric poetry or, shall we say, it is the lyric genre which, among its other means and subjects, has principally assumed and chosen narration, and modified it poetically.… Dramatic poetry is the last of the three kinds of poetry, in time and in nobility. It is not an inspiration, but an invention; it is the child of civilization, not of nature; it is poetry by convention and by the wishes of its authors, rather than by reason of its essence.¹⁰⁴

Poetry is divided into three kinds, but the first in order of time and rank is lyric. “True and pure poetry in its every form,” the lyric appears to have spread to all peoples, for it is the primitive form of verbal art, the “free and straightforward expression of any living and deeply held human feeling”; and it is distinguished from the other kinds just as an original is opposed to a derivative, or the natural is opposed to the artificial. The categories that Leopardi uses to define theater in verse trace out a negative outline of the qualities of lyric poetry: drama is “the child of civilization,” that is, “poetry by convention and by the wishes of its authors”; by contrast, lyric is the child of nature, that is, poetry “by reason of its essence” and by “inspiration.”

A year and a half after his reflections from December 1826, Leopardi returns to his theory of genres in order to refine it. He writes that because epos requires a plan, arranged coldly in advance, it goes against the nature of poetry; that authentic inspiration cannot be prolonged; and that works of poetry are necessarily short.¹⁰⁵ He adds that primitive poems are the most poetic and true, and he distinguishes between the conventional verses typical of drama and the natural verses suited to lyric. He writes that the more of a genius the writer is, the greater desire he or she will have for self-expression.¹⁰⁶ A few days later, in an entry dated September 10, 1828, Leopardi’s theory of genres arrives at its ultimate achievement:

The poet does not imitate nature: rather is it true that nature speaks within him and through his mouth. I’ mi son un che quando Natura parla [I am one who when Nature speaks], etc., a true definition of the poet. Thus the poet is not an imitator except of himself. When through imitation he truly takes leave of himself, that really is no longer poetry, a divine faculty; that is a human art, it is prose, despite the verse and the language.¹⁰⁷

This is perhaps the most markedly Romantic passage, the one in which some ideas that had circulated since the second half of the eighteenth century assume a radical form. Authentic poetry is foreign to artifice, convention, and imitation; the poet imitates only himself. From that moment on, for the sake of the idea that poetry is identical to lyric, understood in the Romantic and modern sense, Leopardi abandoned classicist subgenres. Titles like Canzoni or “Idilli” disappeared. The Florentine edition of his poetry (1831) would be titled simply Canti, a word that belongs neither to the categories used by ancient poetics to classify short poetic forms, nor to the categories based on meter originating in medieval times. Although it derives from the epic tradition, it is used in a markedly lyrical sense.¹⁰⁸

Purified of a few outdated associations, the Romantic theory of lyric poetry continues to have a place in modern common knowledge: the words have changed but the reasoning of the discourse has remained the same. Nobody today would use the vocabulary of Wordsworth or Leopardi, but it is very common to come across the same idea in its twentieth-century version and read that the poet is spoken by the unconscious, by language, by rhythm, or by pure signifier. The Romantic paradigm appears to describe well the mainstream current of modern poetry. For this reason, anyone who chooses to challenge this idea of poetry moves around a hegemonic tradition without ever managing to take away its primacy, like a satellite around a planet. Today, despite the power of alternative models, the poetry collections we leaf through in bookstores contain for the most part short texts in which the poet speaks about himself or herself in a style interpreted as personal.

The lyric spirit we are familiar with is thus formed at the confluence of two theories or, better yet, two discourses. The first describes the overall structure of literature; the second recounts the metamorphosis that poetry is said to have experienced beginning in the late eighteenth century, crossing a historical threshold that varies depending on the national culture. These discourses form a narrative with a simple plot: literature is divided into three genres, two of which are defined by unquestionable formal traits, whereas the third, lyric, owes its identity to the combination of a thematic element (the poet talks about himself or herself) and a formal element (the poet expresses himself or herself through style). This conceptual change was accompanied by an extraordinary transformation in the practice of writing. It was a slow metamorphosis whose effects unfolded for almost a century, in different stages from one literature to another, but which all essentially obeyed the same underlying logic. I will tell this story on two levels: an analysis of an emblematic poem and a history of literary forms in the longue durée. I have chosen to start with an exemplary text, a work that many believe to be the first modern poem of Italian literature.

1. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik; English translation, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 2, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 1116.

2. See Gérard Genette, Introduction à l’architexte (1979); English translation, The Architext: An Introduction, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

3. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, West-östlicher Divan (1819); English translation, West-East Divan: The Poems, with “Notes and Essays”: Goethe’s Intercultural Dialogues, trans. Martin Bidney and Peter Anton von Arnim (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 227.

4. Ibid.

5. Émile Benveniste, “La nature des pronoms (1956)”; English translation, “The Nature of Pronouns,” in Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971), 217–222.

6. See Peter Szondi, “Von der normativen zur spekulativen Gattungspoetik,” in Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie II (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 7–183; Genette, The Architext, 39–49; Karl Viëtor, “L’Histoire des genres littéraires” (1931); French translation in Gérard Genette, Hans Robert Jauss, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Robert Scholes, Wolf-Dieter Stempel, and Karl Viëtor, Théorie des genres (Paris: Seuil, 1986), 9–36; and William Elford Rogers, The Three Genres and the Interpretation of Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 53ff.

7. Irene Behrens, Die Lehre von der Einteilung der Dichtkunst vornehmlich vom 16. bis 19. Jahrhundert: Studien zur Geschichte der poetischen Gattungen (Halle / Saale: Niemeyer, 1940); Benedetto Croce, “La teoria della poesia lirica nella poetica del Cinquecento,” in Poeti e scrittori del pieno e del tardo Rinascimento (1945), vol. 2 (Bari: Laterza, 1958), 108–117; Mario Fubini, “Genesi e storia dei generi letterari (1948–1951),” in Critica e poesia (Bari: Laterza, 1956), 143–274; Claudio Guillén, Literature as System (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 375–419; Teresa Michałowska, “The Notion of Lyrics and the Category of Genre in Ancient and Later Theory of Poetry,” Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich 15, no. 1 (1972): 47–69; Antonio García Berrio, Formación de la teoría literaria moderna: La tópica horaciana en Europa (Madrid: Cupsa Editorial, 1977), 94–109; Genette, The Architexte; Walter Ralph Johnson, The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Gustavo Guerrero, Teorías de la lírica (1998), French translation, Poétique et poésie lyrique, trans. Anne-Joëlle Stéphan and Gustavo Guerrero (Paris: Seuil, 2000); Giuseppe Bernardelli, Il testo lirico: Logica e forma di un tipo letterario (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2002); Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), chaps. 2 and 3.

8. Plato, Republic, 3.392d; English translation by G. M. A. Grube, rev. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992).

9. Plato, Republic, 3.394b–c.

10. Aristotle, Poetics, 1.1447a, 3.1448a.

11. Ibid., 3.1448a.19–23.

12. See Hans Färber, Die Lyrik in der Kunsttheorie der Antike (Munich: Neuer Filser, 1936), 3ff.; Behrens, Die Lehre von der Einteilung der Dichtkunst, 17–32.

13. See Behrens, Die Lehre von der Einteilung der Dichtkunst, 33ff.; Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern: Francke, 1948); English translation, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 438–443.

14. Republic, 3.394b–c, 3.392e–3.393b.

15. Diomedes, Ars grammatica, 3, De poematibus (1.482, 14ff. Keil).

16. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 2, 1116.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid., vol. 2, 1037.

19. Färber, Die Lyrik in der Kunsttheorie der Antike, 11ff.; Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 182–188.

20. Plato, Gorgias, 449d; Republic, 10.607a; Laws, 3.700a.

21. Plato, Laws, 3.700a–d; Republic, 3.392d.

22. See Färber, Die Lyrik in der Kunsttheorie der Antike, 4; Luigi Enrico Rossi, “I generi letterari e le loro leggi scritte e non scritte nelle letterature classiche,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London 18 (1971), 74–75.

23. See Proclus, Chrestomathy, fragment 11 Severyns (= Photios, Bibliotheca, 318b3–4).

24. See Odysseus Tsagarakis, Self-Expression in Early Greek Lyric, Elegiac and Iambic Poetry (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1977). The most interesting of these signs of self-expression involve lyric poetry in the narrow sense. In a well-known passage from Ion, in which Socrates explains poetic furor, the melopoioi are mentioned as inspired poets whose compositions are an example of enthousiasmos (533d–535a). Perhaps Plato was thinking of the ancient bond between lyric and religious ceremonies or of the transfiguring power of music and dance: the fact remains that the association between lyric poetry and the theory of furor runs throughout ancient poetics. It reappears in the way Horace describes the obsession of lyricus vates, and it becomes a topos of classicist poetics between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There is no need to point out the association between these commonplaces and the Romantic image of poets who lose themselves in the flow of passions, or the post-Romantic image of poets who, in allowing forces to speak through them, forget their own identity and become the mouthpiece of an “other” language. In this regard, see Guerrero, Poétique et poésie lyrique, 24–26 and 49–50; and Bernardelli, Il testo lirico, 13–15.

25. See Paul Allen Miller, Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness: The Birth of a Genre from Archaic Greece to Augustan Rome (London: Routledge, 1994), 11–13.

26. See ibid.

27. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 10.1, 46–60.

28. Tacitus, Dialogus de oratoribus, 10.4; English translation, A Dialogue on Oratory, in The Complete Works of Tacitus, trans. Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb (New York: Modern Library, 1942), 742.

29. Diomedes, Ars grammatica, 3, De poematibus (1.482, 14ff. Keil).

30. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 358.

31. Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 157ff.

32. Behrens, Die Lehre von der Einteilung der Dichtkunst, 36–37, 53–57; Edgar de Bruyne, Études d’esthétique médiévale (Bruges: De Tempel, 1946), vol. 1, 156–157, vol. 2, 18ff.

33. See Pierre Bec, La lyrique française au Moyen Âge (XIIe - XIIIe siècles): Contribution à une typologie des genres poétiques médiévaux (Paris: Picard, 1977–1978), vol. 1, 35–39.

34. See Behrens, Die Lehre von der Einteilung der Dichtkunst.

35. Petrarch, Familiares; English translation, Letters on Familiar Matters Vol. 3: Books XVII–XXIV, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (New York: Italica Press, 2005), 10, lines 1–2, 336.

36. See Guerrero, Poétique et poésie lyrique, 73ff.

37. See Behrens, Die Lehre von der Einteilung der Dichtkunst, 71ff. and 85ff.

38. See Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), vol. 1, 157–162, 209, 533–538, 541–542. Sassetti’s letter was reported by Croce, “La teoria della poesia lirica nella poetica del Cinquecento,” 109.

39. See Pomponio Torelli, Trattato della poesia lirica (1594), in Trattati di poetica e retorica del Cinquecento, ed. Bernard Weinberg (Bari: Laterza, 1974), vol. 4, 237–317, especially 263–266.

40. Alessandro Guarini, “Lezione … sopra il sonetto ‘Doglia, che vaga Donna …’ di Monsignor Della Casa” (1599), in Giovanni Della Casa, Opere, vol. 1 (Venice: Angiolo Pasinello, 1728), 341.

41. Torquato Tasso, “Discorsi dell’arte poetica,” in Discorsi dell’arte poetica e del poema eroico, ed. Luigi Poma (Bari: Laterza, 1964), 41ff.

42. Lodovico Castelvetro, Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta (1570), ed. Werther Romani, vol. 1 (Bari: Laterza, 1978), 257.

43. Marvin T. Herrick, The Fusion of Horatian and Aristotelian Literary Criticism, 1531–1555 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1946). See also Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, chap. 4; Baxter Hathaway, The Age of Criticism: The Late Renaissance in Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962); Antonio García Berrio, Formación de la teoría literaria moderna; Brigitte Kappl, Die Poetik des Aristoteles in der Dichtungstheorie des Cinquecento (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006).

44. Antonio Sebastiano Minturno, De poeta (Venice: F. Rampazetum, 1559), 27, and L’arte poetica (Venice: Giovanni Andrea Valvassori, 1564), 3.

45. Minturno, L’arte poetica, 169–170.

46. Ibid., 75.

47. Aristotle, Poetics, 14.1460a.7.

48. Angelo Segni,” Lezioni intorno alla poesia,” in Trattati di poetica e retorica del Cinquecento (Bari: Laterza, 1972), 21–22.

49. See Marco Santagata, Dal sonetto al canzoniere (Padova: Liviana, 1989), 131ff., and I frammenti dell’anima (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992).

50. See Croce, “La teoria della poesia lirica nella poetica del Cinquecento,” 108; Hathaway, The Age of Criticism, 36–37; Giulio Ferroni, “La teoria della lirica. Difficoltà e tendenze,” in La ‘Locuzione artificiosa’: Teoria ed esperienza della lirica a Napoli nell’età del manierismo, ed. Giulio Ferroni and Amedeo Quondam (Rome: Bulzoni, 1973), 13–32; Guerrero, Poétique et poésie lyrique, 101; Guglielmo Frezza, “Sul concetto di ‘lirica’ nelle teorie platoniche e aristoteliche del Cinquecento,” Lettere italiane 53, no. 2 (2001): 278–294; and Bernardelli, Il testo lirico, 41 and 48–54.

51. Croce, “La teoria della poesia lirica nella poetica del Cinquecento,” 111–112; Fubini, “Genesi e storia dei generi letterari,” 159ff.

52. “Let them see what an opinion and judgment they attribute to Aristotle, and if it is worthy of him, but let them see rather that he cannot intend it in this way, because if poetry is imitation and if imitation is what has been said, that is, speaking in the person of others, then dithyrambs, which are not lyrical verses, will not be poetry because Plato says manifestly that in dithyrambs the poet does not speak in the person of others but always as himself; and nevertheless Aristotle establishes dithyrambs as one of the main kinds of poetry and consequently for imitation, but never speaking in the person of others.” Segni, Lezioni intorno alla poesia, 22–23.

53. Guarini, “Lezione … sopra il sonetto ‘Doglia, che vaga Donna …’ di Monsignor Della Casa,” 341.

54. Ibid., 346–347.

55. See Hathaway, The Age of Criticism, 81–87; Frezza, “Sul concetto di ‘lirica’ nelle teorie platoniche e aristoteliche del Cinquecento,” 281.

56. Minturno, L’Arte poetica, 175; Segni, Lezioni intorno alla poesia, 35; Giovanni Antonio Viperano, De poetica libri tres (Antwerp: Christophori Plantini, 1579), 149; Torelli, Trattato della poesia lirica, 265; Guarini, “Lezione … sopra il sonetto ‘Doglia, che vaga Donna …’ di Monsignor Della Casa,” 347–349.

57. See Hathaway, The Age of Criticism, 15, 35, 43–45, 84–88; Frezza, “Sul concetto di ‘lirica’ nelle teorie platoniche e aristoteliche del Cinquecento,” 285–287.

58. Tasso, “Discorsi dell’arte poetica,” 49.

59. See Guerrero, Poétique et poésie lyrique, 177–183.

60. Giulio Cesare Scaligero, Poetices libri septem ([Lugduni]: Antonium Vincentium, 1561), book 7, 347.

61. Filippo Sassetti, Lettere edite e inedite, ed. Ettore Marcucci (Florence: Le Monnier, 1855), 65.

62. Ibid., 66–67.

63. Behrens, Die Lehre von der Einteilung der Dichtkunst, 125–127, 158–160, 165–167; Genette, The Architexte, 28.

64. Behrens, Die Lehre von der Einteilung der Dichtkunst, 134ff. and 206ff.; Meyer H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 84–88; Genette, The Architexte, 28–31.

65. See Behrens, Die Lehre von der Einteilung der Dichtkunst, 134–147; René Bray, La Formation de la doctrine classique en France (Paris: Nizet, 1945), 350–354.

66. See Dominique Bouhours, La Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit (Paris: Veuve de Sébastien Mabre-Cramoisy, 1687).

67. Eustachio Manfredi, “Lettera al signor marchese Giovan Gioseffo Orsi,” in Giovan Gioseffo Orsi, Considerazioni sopra la Maniera di Ben Pensare ne’componimenti (Modena: Bartolomeo Soliani, 1735), 684 and 700. On the Franco-Italian controversy in the early eighteenth century, see Corrado Viola, Tradizioni letterarie a confronto: Italia e Francia nella polemica Orsi-Bonhours (Verona: Fiorini, 2001).

68. Manfredi, “Lettera al signor marchese Giovan Gioseffo Orsi,” 686.

69. “And to reveal this secret in brief, I believe that the aversion of the French to the Tuscan Poets arises from them having given themselves over almost entirely to certain familiar and playful kinds of compositions, for which, to perfect them, they seem to pursue nothing more than what a written Oration would require, other than the poetic meter and rhyme. As a consequence, it then followed that even in serious Lyrical Compositions they necessarily kept the use of largely the same domestic manners of telling tales, without putting much care into investing in their style so that it may be raised above prose and be distinct from it.… That the French have reduced almost all their Poetry to a playful and domestic style requires no proof at all, methinks. For starting from Villon, and Marot, who are the oldest among those they recognize as their Poets, and finishing with the times of today, including the most select Compositions, I believe that three-quarters at least are written in this playful and risible style.” Ibid., 687.

70. Ibid., 688–689.

71. Charles Batteux, Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un même principe (1746); English translation, The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle, trans. James O. Young (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

72. Ibid., chap. 10 (“On Lyric Poetry”).

73. Ibid., 119.

74. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 21–26.

75. Batteux, The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle, 120.

76. Ibid., 123.

77. William Jones, Essay on the Arts Commonly Called Imitative, in The Collected Works of Sir William Jones (New York: New York University Press, 1993), vol. 10, 363.

78. Ibid.

79. Ibid., 371.

80. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 87–88.

81. Guerrero cites Lectures on Poetry (1711) by Joseph Trapp, in which the lyric is presented as the most poetic of all kinds of poetry (Guerrero, Poétique et poésie lyrique, 191). It should be noted that Lectures on Poetry is the English translation of the Latin Praelectiones poeticae, and that Trapp is referring to lyric in the narrow sense, as defined by the criteria of classicist poetics and rigorously separated off from the other genres of short poetry. See Joseph Trapp, Praelectiones poeticae (Oxford: Lintott, 1711).

82. Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone di pensieri (1817–1832); English translation Zibaldone, trans. by Michael Caesar and Franco D’Intino (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 4357–4358, August 29, 1828.

83. See Bernardelli, Il testo lirico, 76–91.

84. Jones, Essay on the Arts Commonly Called Imitative, 374.

85. Leopardi, Zibaldone, 4357–4358, August 29, 1828.

86. See Bernardelli, Il testo lirico, 3 and 79.

87. Johann Georg Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–1774), vol. 3 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1994), 299–305.

88. Leopardi, Zibaldone, 4356, August 29, 1828.

89. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), in Essays and Reviews, ed. Gary Richard Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 15.

90. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Poetic Principle” (1850), in Essays and Reviews, 72.

91. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 2, 1136.

92. Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 31.

93. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 2nd ed., ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Routledge, 1991), 291.

94. Ibid., 365–366.

95. Ibid., 367–370.

96. Francesco De Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana (1870–1871); English translation, History of Italian Literature, trans. Joan Redfern (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931).

97. Ibid., vol. 2, chap. 20 (“The New Literature”).

98. Ibid., 905–906.

99. Ibid., 909.

100. Ibid., 853.

101. Ibid., 908.

102. Ibid.

103. See Karl Maurer, Giacomo Leopardis ‘Canti’ und die Auflösung der lyrischen Genera (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1957), 15–193.

104. Leopardi, Zibaldone, 4234–4235, December 15, 1826.

105. Ibid., 4357–4358, August 9, 1828. See also 4413, October 20, 1828; 4417, November 3, 1828; and 4461, February 16, 1829.

106. Ibid., 4357–4358, August 29, 1828.

107. Ibid., 4372–4373, September 10, 1828.

108. See Maurer, Giacomo Leopardis ‘Canti,’ 197ff.