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:
“Love’s the only thing I’ve thought of or read about since I was knee-high. That’s what I always dreamed of, of meeting somebody and falling in love. And when that remarkable thing happened, I was going to recite poetry to her for hours about how her heart’s an angel’s wing and her hair the strings of a heavenly harp. Instead I got drunk and hollered at her and called her a harpy.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)
“Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man’s life if he has the weight and cares about the words.”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)
“Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.... Of all things of thought, poetry is the closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art ...”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)