The great "I am."

Petrarch (1304-1374)

Diplomat, scholar, poet, churchman

First poet laureate of the modern age

Born to a Notary in Florence, Francesco di Petracco read law at his father’s insistence, but protested he “could not face making a merchandise of my mind” arguing points of view determined by who was paying him. When his dad bet on the wrong, or, depending- right pope, the family went into exile at Avignon, where the young lawyer went into holy orders and a career in the ecclesiastical bureaucracy.

His sinecure left him plenty of time to write. He published an epic poem on the life of Scipio Africanus. The work exploded upon the literary landscape; at thirty he was crowned “poet laureate” on Rome’s Capitoline Hill and became a literary rock star. Self-aware to the extent of inventing the modern notion of self-awareness, he changed his name, the scholar Jacques Barzun wrote, “for a purpose that can only be called aesthetic….with a poet’s ear  he decided it was not a euphonious run of syllables. Cutting a c, adding an r to lengthen the middle, and changing o to a at the end to make Petrarcha (in Latin poeta ends in a) was as deft a piece of work as making a good verse.”

The laureateship, Barzun observed, “somewhat dimmed, is still with us...it persists in England, where it is a lifetime post whose holder is expected to celebrate great events in verse. The harvest of poetry has been small. In the United States since 1985 a series of incumbents have held the title for one year each, with the modest expectation that their elevation will publicize the importance of literature.”

By contrast, “Petrarch’s celebration at Rome signifies much more: it means that the aura of the Roman past  was in the air; intimations of things to come. It is in his combining of ‘elements that were wanted’ and adding one or two that Petrarch is a new man, who inspired imitation without end.

He traveled widely, a part-time diplomat, and met everyone. The laurels opened nearly all doors, including archives in which he rediscovered the forgotten manuscripts and letters of the Roman statesman Cicero. His was a popularizer; at best, an accidental innovator: his influence on modern Italian arose from his inability to master the classic Latin meters; his diplomatic orations were more performance art than concrete achievements; and his Greek was always a bit sketchy.

He was Walt Whitman before there was Walt Whitman. "I am unlike anybody I know,” he wrote. In 1346 he climbed a mountain just to take in the view (“If this was done before him,” Barzun drily noted, “it was not recorded. Nature had been endlessly discussed, but as a generality, not as this landscape.") He coined the term “Dark Ages” to describe the bleak, unlearned age before he came long.  Rather like another playboy rock star, Liszt, Petrarch hedged his bets in old age, publishing a tract on Contempt for the World and making a fetish of the works of Augustine. Barzun adds, “One can imagine Petrarch retiring to a Humanist convent, had there been such a thing. Al he wanted to do then was cultivate the good letters so as “to shut out the reality of my own times.” There being no Humanist convents, Petrarch settled in Padua, where he died one day short of his 70th birthday. His will made all sorts of bequests, but no specific provision for his library. He had promised it to Venice and assumed his wishes would be honored; but at his death Padua and Venice were crossways, and his painstakingly-assembled collection was scattered all over Europe.

Related sites:

Petrarch: The Complete Canzoniere

Petrarch’s Sonnets, in side by side Italian/English translations

Petrarch: Humanistic Texts