Sicilian School - The Limitations of Sicilian Poetry

The Limitations of Sicilian Poetry

The main inhibiting factor on Sicilian poetry was probably the political censorship imposed by Frederick: literary debate was confined to courtly love. In this respect, the poetry of the north, though stuck to the langues d'oïl, provided fresher blood for satire. The north was fragmented into communes or little city-states which had a relatively democratic self-government, and that is precisely why the sirventese genre, and later, Dante's Divina Commedia and sonnets were so popular: they referred to real people and feelings, though often idealised like Beatrice. A sirventese is, in effect, eminently political: it usually refers to real battles and attacks real military or political enemies, the author often being the soldier or the knight involved in the strife, as in Guittone d'Arezzo's Rotta di Montaperti (Defeat of Montaperti), a bloody battle where Manfred of Sicily, Frederick's son, defeated the guelfs. Dante himself will commemorate the event in the Commedia many years later, where, mindful of the political strife that had him exiled, he will attack many princes and popes, such as Boniface VIII, one of his biggest personal enemies.

Frederick's censorship is also apparent from the structure of the song: the Sicilians transformed the tornada, the strophe which in troubadour poetry contains a dedication to a famous person with a congedo, where the poet bids goodbye to his reader and asks the song to bear his message to his lady. The re-shaping of the Occitan model also involved the suppression of music. The authors were great readers and translators, but apparently could not play any instrument, so their work was intended for reading, which called for logical unity, posing a question, proposing, and finding a solution in the end.

That meant no interchangeable lines as in troubadour poetry and fewer repetitions: for a French jongleur who sang his poems these were necessary, but they sounded redundant to the Sicilian authors. Their poetry was music to the eye, not to the ear, and their legacy is also apparent in Dante and Petrarch's lyrics. The sonnet is even more exacting on this point: the separation between the octave and the sestet is purely a logical one, the rimes drawing a visual line between the first and last part. However, the fact that Italian poetry was being made for the reading public may have facilitated its circulation.