Verse
The originality that Immanuel lacked as a scholar, he possessed as a poet. In his verse this is given free play, and his poems assured him a place in history. A product of his time, in sympathy with the social and intellectual life of medieval Italy, he had acquired the then-prevalent pleasing, easy, humorous, harmlessly flippant tone and the art of treating questionable subjects wittily and elegantly. He composed in both Hebrew and Italian, but only a few of his Italian poems have survived. In a truly national spirit, they portray and satirize the political and religious conditions of that time. Immanuel was held in high regard by his contemporaneous Italian poets. Two Italian sonnets referring to his death have been preserved, which place him as a poet beside Dante. In fact, Immanuel knew Dante's works and drew upon them. His Italian and Hebrew poems are both full of traces of Dante's style and themes.
Read more about this topic: Immanuel The Roman
Famous quotes containing the word verse:
“Much verse fails of being poetry because it was not written exactly at the right crisis, though it may have been inconceivably near to it. It is only by a miracle that poetry is written at all. It is not recoverable thought, but a hue caught from a vaster receding thought.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously declaimed, or second-rate verse spoken with all a bad poet’s bombast!”
—Jean De La Bruyère (1645–1696)
“All which is not prose is verse; and all which is not verse is prose.”
—Molière [Jean Baptiste Poquelin] (1622–1673)