Abstract

The essay deals with the problem of themes and genres identification in poetry and offers new analytical tools by demonstrating the rhetorical nature of sixteenth-century poetry. In fact, Petrarchist lyric texts should be studied with closer attention to their historical nature (not lastly because of their anchorage to the classical tradition) and as the result of the interrelation of three dimensions: the biography, the code (the socio-cultural and literary models), and the artistic creation. In this sense, this article offers an analysis of the funeral song Alma cortese by Pietro Bembo, in which the personal grief is elaborated through the transposition into an exemplary dimension and its reconsideration in light of the salvific value of the poetic word, but it is also presented through the filter of classical rhetoric norms. Furthermore, a new reading of Giovanni Guidiccioni’s sonnet 90 points out how the precise identification of the text’s genre is an essential operation as it orients the interpretation of the conventional elements and of the meaning.