Poetry
According to one version of his vida, Uc non fez gaires de las cansos ("never accomplished much with his songs"), apparently because he was "never really in love with a lady". While the biographer commended his lyrical and melodic compositions, he probably regarded his fifteen cansos out of a total forty-four poems as unusually low. He was reputed to be able to feign love and to praise and belittle women with ease, but after his marriage his poetic output ceased.
Uc's poetry was influenced by his ecclesiastical education. As mentioned above, he wrote cansos and tensos, but also some sirventes. His work is in general pedantic and truculent. One of Uc's sirventes, which begins Messonget, un sirventes, acknowledges that it is el son d'en Arnaut Plagues ("the song of lord Arnaut Plagues"), an imitation of Be volgra midons saubres by Arnaut. Another of his sirventes, which begins as a "light" work with many textual affinities to at least four other troubadour works, but it ends as a political assault on Ezzelino III da Romano, the viceroy of the Emperor Frederick II in Italy: Chanzos q'es leu per entendre.
In Un sirventes voill far, Uc demonstrates a hatred of the emperor, accusing him, a "monster of heresy", of believing in neither immortality nor paradise. Furthermore, he intends to humiliate France and the Church and so the Crusade against him in Apulia is justified because selh qu'en Dieu non cre non deu terra tener: "he who does not believe in God should nto reign".
Uc also composed a danseta in which the refrain was apparently repeated between the four stanzas.
Read more about this topic: Uc De Saint Circ
Famous quotes containing the word poetry:
“There is no gilding of setting sun or glamor of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers’ wives.”
—Hamlin Garland (1860–1940)
“That was a way of putting it not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“That’s why I quit and took up writing poetry instead.
It’s clean, it’s relaxing, it doesn’t squirt juice all over
Something you were certain of a minute ago and now your own face
Is a stranger and no one can tell you it’s true. Hey, stupid!”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)