Poesia d’armi e poesia politica dalle Origini a Dante

“War poetry and political poetry from the Origins to Dante”. The essay analyses the relationships between war poetry and political poetry in the Italian lyric tradition of the Origins. Dante’s statement that no Italian poet had yet treated arms in poetry, as Bertran de Born had done in Provencal (“De vulgari eloquentia” II ii 10), proves itself to be correct. Indeed, only few Italian texts are consistent with the Occitan war poetry tradition, for different reasons: Orlanduccio’s sonnet “Oi tu, che se’ errante cavaliero”, whose battle sketch and neutral point of view on the outcome of the imminent war (between Conradin of Swabia and Charles of Anjou) recall the Occitan sirventes tradition; Henry of Castile’s canzone “Alegramente e con grande baldanza”, a veritable Italian sirventes against Charles of Anjou; Guittone d’Arezzo’s canzone “Ora che la freddore”, written to ser Orlando da Chiusi to spur him to fight ‘wisely’ and recover what he had lost. On the contrary, Monte Andrea’s tenzoni about Charles of Anjou’s campaigns share few traits of the contemporary Provencal texts: Monte and his correspondents seek for extreme formal complexity and express partisan points of view. Italian poets are trained in a legal and municipal environment more than in a military and courtly milieu; when they deal with political matters, they cannot adopt Bertran de Born’s perspective, which fosters strife and violence. As the other political canzoni (by Guittone d’Arezzo, Chiaro Davanzati, Panuccio del Bagno, etc.) show, Italian poets naturally conform to the republican ideology, which considers war a hard necessity and whose cardinal values – according to the pre-humanistic political treatises, such as Brunetto Latini’s “Tresor” – are peace, justice and public good. This contributes to explain the place and penalty Dante assigns to Bertran de Born in his “Inferno”, in the bolgia of the schismatics (canto XXVIII): Bertran’s head severed from his trunk is also a contrapasso for his poetry, which exalted discord and division and instigated to make war following fury more than reason. The essay is dedicated to the memory of Guido Capovilla.