The Italian poets, before Dante, may be broadly divided into two
classes. The first was that of the troubadours, writing in the
Provencal language, hardly to be distinguished from their
contemporaries of the South of France, giving expression in their
verses to the ideas of love, gallantry, and valor which formed the base
of the complex and artificial system of chivalry, repeating constantly
the same fancies and thoughts in similar formulas of words, without
scope or truth of imagination, with rare exhibitions of individual
feeling, with little regard for Nature. Ingenuity is more
characteristic of their poetry than force, subtilty more obvious in it
than beauty. The second and later class were poets who wrote in the
Italian tongue, but still under the influence of the poetic code which
had governed the compositions of their Provencal predecessors. Their
poetry is, for the most part, a faded copy of an unsubstantial
original,--an echo of sounds originally faint. Truth and poetry were
effectually divided. In the latter half of the thirteenth century,
however, a few poets appeared whose verses give evidence of some native
life, and are enlivened by a freer play of fancy and a greater
truthfulness of feeling.
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