Giacomo da Lentini

Abstract

Giacomo da Lentini was the central figure in the formation of the Sicilian school of poetry in the early 13th century at the court of Frederick II. He is plausibly considered to be the inventor of the sonnet and his poetic corpus of sixteen canzoni, twenty-two sonnets, and a discordo amounts to by far the most numerous of any poet associated with Frederick’s court. We might thus say that he is the first major lyric poet of the Italian vernacular tradition. Giacomo demonstrates the influence of the earlier Occitan poetry of courtly love in his borrowings of themes, technical vocabulary, and metrical forms; he also innovates considerably in experimenting with the new sonnet form and crafts a refined poetry that actively distills the intellectual culture of Frederick’s court by way of similes that open up his love poems to science, philosophy, and politics. Giacomo’s influence on the subsequent developments of Italian poetry can be widely felt and perhaps most easily perceived in Dante Alighieri’s mention of him as an illustrious poet in his treatise on vernacular eloquence, De vulgari eloquentia, as well as his occupying the prime position of founding father in the poetic genealogy of Purgatorio 24.