Italian poetry is a category of Italian literature. Italian poetry has its origins in the thirteenth century and has heavily influenced the poetic traditions of many European languages, including that of English.
Italian poetry is a category of Italian literature. Italian poetry has its origins in the thirteenth century and has heavily influenced the poetic traditions of many European languages, including that of English.
The octosyllable or octosyllabic verse is a line of verse with eight syllables. It is equivalent to tetrameter verse in trochees in languages with a stress accent. Its first occurrence is in a 10th-century Old French saint's legend, the Vie de Saint Leger; another early use is in the early 12th-century Anglo-Norman Voyage de saint Brendan. It is often used in French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese poetry. While commonly used in couplets, typical stanzas using octosyllables are: décima, some quatrains, redondilla.
In Spanish verse, an octosyllable is a line that has its seventh syllable stressed, on the principle that this would normally be the penultimate syllable of a word (Lengua Castellana y Literatura, ed. Grazalema Santillana. El Verso y su Medida, p. 46). If the final word of a line does not fit this pattern, the line could have eight or seven or nine syllables (as normally counted), thus –
Dante Alighieri (Italian: [ˈdante aliˈɡjɛːri]; most likely baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri; c. May 1265 – September 14, 1321), widely known mononymously as Dante, was an Italian poet, writer, and philosopher. His Divine Comedy, originally called Comedìa (modern Italian: Commedia) and later christened Divina by Giovanni Boccaccio, is widely considered one of the most important poems of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language.
At a time when Latin was still the dominant language for scholarly and literary writing—and when many Italian poets drew inspiration from French or Provençal traditions—Dante broke with both by writing in the vernacular, specifically his native Tuscan dialect. His De vulgari eloquentia (On Eloquence in the Vernacular) was one of the first scholarly defenses of the vernacular. His use of the Florentine dialect for works such as The New Life (1295) and Divine Comedy helped establish the modern-day standardized Italian language. His work set a precedent that important Italian writers such as Petrarch and Boccaccio would later follow.
Jacopo da Lentini, also known as Giacomo da Lentini or with the appellative Il Notaro, was an 13th-century Italian poet and inventor. He was a senior poet of the Sicilian School and was a notary at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Jacopo is credited with the invention of the sonnet. His poetry was originally written in literary Sicilian, though it only survives in Tuscan.
Although some scholars believe that da Lentini's Italian poetry about courtly love was an adaptation of the Provençal poetry of the troubadours, William Baer argues that the first eight lines of the earliest Sicilian sonnets, rhymed ABABABAB, are identical to the eight-line Sicilian folksong stanza known as the Strambotto. Therefore, da Lentini, or whoever else invented the form, added two tercets to the Strambotto in order to create the 14-line Sicilian sonnet.
In Italian poetry, verso sciolto (plural versi sciolti) refers to poetry written in hendecasyllables and lacking rhyme. It is very similar to blank verse in English poetry, and the two terms are often used interchangeably.