Hieroglyph of Time : The Petrarchan Sestina.
Title:
Hieroglyph of Time : The Petrarchan Sestina.
Author:
Shapiro, Marianne.
ISBN:
9780816655168
Personal Author:
Physical Description:
1 online resource (267 pages)
Contents:
CONTENTS -- PREFATORY NOTE -- Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION -- 1. Preliminary -- 2. A Symbolic Icon -- 3. The Sestina Form -- 4. Temporality and Poetic Language -- 5. Number Symbolism: The Numbers 6 and 7 -- 6. The Missing Center -- 7. The Sestina as an Example of Closure -- 8. Closure and Openness -- 9. Myth and Poetic Process -- 10. The Rhyme-Word: Metonymic Progression -- 11. The Sestina: Diachrony -- Chapter 2. ARNAUT AND ARNALDIANS -- 1. Arnaut Daniel: "Lo ferm voler" -- 2. Guilhem de Saint-Grigori: "Ben granz avolesa intra" -- 3. Ezra Pound: "Sestina: Altaforte" -- Chapter 3. CONCEPTS OF TIME AND THE PETRARCHAN SESTINA -- 1. Time and the Heavenly Bodies: Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine -- 2. Man and Time: Christian Conceptions -- 3. Petrarch's Sestinas and the Problem of the Center -- 4. Excursus: Lorenzo de' Medici -- 5. Time, the Pastoral, and Petrarch -- 6. Tornado, and Adynaton: The Problems of Repetition and Rhyme -- Chapter 4. DANTE -- FIVE SESTINAS BY PETRARCH -- 1. "Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra" -- 2. XXII: "A qualunque animale alberga in terra" -- 3. LXVI: "L'aere gravato, e l'importuna nebbia" -- 4. CXLII: "A la dolce ombra delle belle frondi" -- 5. CCXIV: "Anzi tre dì creata era alma in parte" -- 6. CCCXXXII: "Mia benigna fortuna e 'l viver lieto" -- Chapter 5. DIALECTICS OF RENAISSANCE IMITATION: THE CASE OF PONTUS DE TYARD -- Chapter 6. THE PASTORAL SESTINA -- 1. Introductory -- 2. Sir Philip Sidney: "Since wailing is a bud of causeful sorrow" -- 3. Edmund Spenser: "Ye wastefull Woodes! bear witness of my woe" -- 4. W. H. Auden: "Paysage moralisé" -- 5. W. H. Auden: "We have brought you, they said, a map of the country -- 6. The Modern Sestina: W. S. Merwin and John Ashbery -- 7. W. S. Merwin: "Sestina" -- 8.John Ashbery: "Poem" -- Chapter 7. THE SHIP ALLEGORY -- 1. Petrarch LIII: "Chi è fermato di menar sua vita".
2. Michelangelo Buonarroti: "Crudele stella, anzi crudele arbitrio" -- 3. Giuseppe Ungaretti: "Recitativo di Palinuro" -- Chapter 8. EPILOGUE -- REFERENCES -- INDEXES -- Index of Subjects -- A -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Index of Names -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- G -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Z.
Abstract:
Hieroglyph of Time was first published in 1981. "A dance of the intellect among words," Ezra Pound called the sestina. A poetic form invented by a Provençal troubadour, Arnaut Daniel, the sestina was elaborated and refined by Petrarch and is used today exactly as it was created. In Hieroglyph of Time, the first critical study of the sestina, Marianne Shapiro analyzes poems by Daniel, Petrarch, Pontus de Tyard, Sannazaro, Sidney, Spenser, Auden, Pound, Merwin, and Ashbery and discusses sestinas composed in German and Portuguese. In so doing, she traces a strand that links modern to Medieval poetry. Shapiro's methodology demonstrates, furthermore, that it is possible to reconcile the language of structuralism with a historical approach to literary scholarship. Hieroglyph of Time begins with a general introduction to theories of temporality and a chronological discussion of the sestina tradition. The repetition of end words in the sestina makes the form a reflection on time, and the sestina itself, Shapiro argues, is a poignant and searching exploration of temporality. The heart of the book is devoted to an explication of five of Petrarch's sestinas. Shapiro pursues Renaissance imitations of the Petrarchan sestina in the work of Pontus de Tyard, a member of the Pléiade who adapted the sestina in a neoplatonic mode, and of Spenser and Sidney, who made the sestina a pastoral poem. After examining twentieth-century uses of the pastoral, she recapitulates her survey, returning to Italian literature to see how the ship allegory is used by three poets in the Medieval, Renaissance, and modern periods -- Petrarch, Michelangelo, and Ungaretti.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
Genre:
Electronic Access:
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