Petrarch and the Unfinished Book (Canzoniere) (Critical Essay‪)‬

The problem that Petrarch's Canzoniere poses for the modern reader is the same as that posed by all collections of poems assembled by their author: it is a matter of understanding the connection between each of the poems and the collection, the relation between the whole and the parts. On the one hand, the collection presents a discontinuous series of poems composed separately that can be read as discrete works; on the other hand, the same poems come together as part of a love and/or existential story. Our task is to study the Canzoniere as a macrotext and to clarify the relation of each of the compositions to the collection of lyric verse to which it belongs. Petrarch's desperate attempt to complete his work is the same hopeless challenge that the mythical Arachne dared to make to Minerva. At the deepest level Petrarch reveals an awareness of the fact that every human endeavor is a spider's web that is woven in the course of a lifetime, and thus is never completed. The destiny of human beings therefore is to weave a tapestry that is never finished, just as the fate of the poet is to write an in-finite work; namely, a work that in the end can never reach the perfection and integrity of the divine work. **********