• DOI:10.2307/2855144
• Corpus ID: 162823092

The Sestina: An Exploration of the Dynamics of Poetic Structure

@article{Spanos1978TheSA,
  title={The Sestina: An Exploration of the Dynamics of Poetic Structure},
  author={Margaret Spanos},
  journal={Speculum},
  year={1978},
  volume={53},
  pages={545 - 557}
}

• Margaret Spanos
• Published 1 July 1978
• Art
• Speculum

THE sestina has been condemned by modern critics as a sterile and artificial form, for being, as De Sanctis so devastatingly comments, "in tanta povert'a e servilitai cosi affettata e pretensiosa."' Yet the form enjoyed undoubted prestige in the Renaissance, largely because its "pretensions" were taken seriously by Dante and Petrarch. Perhaps, in the light of its early literary fortunes, the sestina should now be examined from a more sympathetic point of view in an attempt to rediscover operative formal and/or symbolic principles that can make its former stature comprehensible to modern readers. If such an attempt is successful, it may prove to be a fruitful starting point for the reconsideration of certain other Renaissance poetic forms, especially the enigmatic "squared" poems, which are usually regarded as trivial exercises in technical virtuosity rather than as symbolic forms whose particular aesthetic effects emerge from a coherent poetic vision. It is useful to approach the sestina historically in this endeavor, since the key that opens up the significance inherent in the form itself can be discovered in the practice of the foremost writers in the genre: Arnaut Daniel, Dante, and Petrarch. Arnaut's Loferm voler, the first and definitive example of the sestina, had, as Maria Picchio Simonelli notes, "grande fortuna e diffusione sia in Provenza che in Italia. . . . Quando Dante la imitava, essa era dunque gi'a considerata un testo-modello e gia accennava a prender la forma di un genere letterario a parte."2 The technical intricacy and obscurity of the form identified it as a prominent example of the much-admired Proven(;al poetics of "entrebescar los motz"3 associated with the trobar clus and the trobar ric, a poetics usually epitomized in the paradoxical and enigmatic lines of Arnaut himself: