The metrical poems of the eleventh century have been spoken of already, especially the more interesting ones written in Italy.[1] Most of the Latin poetry emanating from that classic land was metrical, or so intended. Frequently it tells the story of wars, or gives the Gesta of notable lives, making a kind of versified biography. One feels as if verse was employed as a refuge from the dead annalistic form. This poetry was a semi-barbarizing of the antique, without new formal or substantial elements. Italy, one may say, never became essentially and creatively mediaeval: the pressure of antique survival seems to have barred original development; Italians took little part in the great mediaeval military religious movements, the Crusades; no strikingly new architecture arose with them; their first vernacular poetry was an imitation or a borrowing from Provence and France; and by far the greater part of their Latin poetry presents an uncreative barbarizing of the antique metres.
These remarks find illustration in the principal Latin poems composed in Italy in the twelfth century. Among them one observes differences in skill, knowledge, and tendency. Some of the writers made use of leonine hexameters, others avoided the rhyme. But they were all akin in lack of excellence and originality both in composition and verse-form. There was the monk Donizo of Canossa, who wrote the Vita of the great Countess Matilda;[2] there was William of Apulia, Norman in spirit if not in blood, who wrote of the Norman conquests in Apulia and Sicily;[3] also the anonymous and barbarous De bello et excidio urbis
- ↑ Ante, Chapter XI., iii.
- ↑ The following leonine hexameters are attributed to Donizo:
"Chrysopolis dudum Graecorum dicitur usu,
Aurea sub lingua sonat haec Urbs esse Latina,
Scilicet Urbs Parma, quia grammatica manet alta,
Artes ac septem studiose sunt ibi lectae."
Muratori, Antiquitates, iii. p. 912. - ↑ William was a few years older than Donizo, and died about the year 1100. His hero is Robert Guiscard, and his poem closes with this bid for the favour of his son, Roger:
"Nostra, Rogere, tibi cognoscis carmina scribi,
Mente tibi laeta studuit parere Poeta:
Semper et auctores hilares meruere datores;
Tu duce Romano Dux dignior Octaviano,
Sis mihi, quaeso, boni spes, ut fuit ille Maroni."
Muratori, Scriptores, v. 247-248.
