Original scientific paper

Distinction of Furies, Classification of Genres

Tonko Maroević ; Institut za povijest i umjetnost, Zagreb, Hrvatska

Abstract

Even though Petrić’s Discorso della diversità de i furori poetici, completed on 13 January 1552, has regularly been taken into consideration when his aesthetic and poetic standpoints are considered, it seems that its symbolic and expressive charge has not been fully exhausted. In this brief and early opuscule, the twenty-four-year old author, still a student of philosophy in Padua, gave the first evidence of his plead for a passionate imaginativeness and the metaphysical, meta-worldly assurance of creative expression, and also demonstrated an indubitable erudition. Along the compulsory citation of the Greek and Roman classics as authorities, he also pointed to the Jewish component of ancient mythology, something that enabled him to establish etymological parallels, even if often arbitrarily derived.
As he himself says, he took off into the celestial spheres on the wings of Plato, and searched for the footholds for his thesis on the supremacy of divine inspiration in poetry in the meaning and value of the Muses, and found correlates in corresponding planets for each of them. He explained the typological and genre differences between certain authors by an astrological interpretation, an esoteric-mystic system of relations between influential stars and poetic spirits inclined towards these stars. Through the mediation of demons, the celestial fury, intoxication, a peculiar rage or poetic insanity is transferred to people, and the greatest, most universal and most integral poets are those who have been influenced by Calliope, the Muse of celestial harmony and spherical consonance. Only those poets who have been stimulated by the highest inspiration can free their imagination from enslavement to materiality, and their work can flow like a river or burst like a fire, whereas the poetry, which originates under the influence of other poetry – which, in that case, functions as a magnet – is colder and mechanical.
In the introductory chapter of his later, synthetic work on poetry Della poetica: La deca disputata (1586), completed after more than three decades, Petrić expounded his understanding of poetic furies, relating them to a melancholic character, and was more conciliatory towards knowledge and skill as poetic movers.

Keywords

Hrčak ID:

71686

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/71686

Publication date:

2.12.2002.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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