A Manifesto of New Singing: "Rerum vulgarium fragmenta" 125-29

The canzone is an essential element of the architecture of Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. The inner spaces of this poetic work are marked by canzones and configurations of canzones. The group of canzones RVF 125-129 is of particular significance within the whole of the so-called Canzoniere. It is a unique group of five canzones and represents, as it were, the very center of Petrarch's new poetics of absence, failure, negativity, and their transgression towards a new poetic positivity of the mind's experience of itself. Going through this series of canzones, we can follow an exemplary movement from radical crisis in Petrarch's conception of poetry to a new poetics of pensare.