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Updated: June 12, 2025
'Whatever I have said to the disadvantage of these three poems, holds much stronger against Tasso's 'Gierusalemme': it is true he has very fine and glaring rays of poetry; but then they are only meteors, they dazzle, then disappear, and are succeeded by false thoughts, poor 'concetti', and absurd impossibilities; witness the Fish and the Parrot; extravagancies unworthy of an heroic poem, and would much better have become Ariosto, who professes 'le coglionerie'.
Corneille was the restorer of true taste, and the founder of the French theatre; although rather inclined to the Italian 'Concetti' and the Spanish 'Agudeze'. Witness those epigrams which he makes Chimene utter in the greatest excess of grief. Before his time, those kind of itinerant authors, called troubadours or romanciers, were a species of madmen who attracted the admiration of fools.
He frequently exclaimed, "That's in bad taste; this man continually brings the Italian concetti on the stage."
The Aminto del Tasso, is much more what it is intended to be, a pastoral: the shepherds, indeed, have their 'concetti' and their antitheses; but are not quite so sublime and abstracted as those in Pastor Fido. I think that you will like it much the best of the two.
Many good words are there engraved in black letters, epigrams reproving the curious, concetti, wittily turned farewells, rendezvous given at which only one side appears, pretentious biographies, glitter, rubbish and tinsel.
Rousseau puts too much rhetoric in his attempt, and Richardson too much preaching. The poets have too many flourishes; the novelists are too much the slaves of facts. Petrarch is too exclusively occupied with his images of speech and his concetti; he sees the poetry more than the woman.
The tender author of "Andromache" could not have been discovered while exhausting himself in running after concetti as surprising as the worst parts of Cowley, in whose spirit alone he could have hit on this perplexing concetto, descriptive of Aurora: "Fille du Jour, qui nais devant ton père!" "Daughter of Day, but born before thy father!"
He frequently exclaimed, "That's in bad taste; this man continually brings the Italian concetti on the stage."
If it be correct to express human thought by writing whole pages of vague and bald abstract metaphysic, and then trying to explain them by concrete concetti, which bear an entirely accidental and mystical likeness to the notion which they are to illustrate, then let the metaphysic be as abstract as possible, the concetti as fanciful and far-fetched as possible.
As regards his literary craftsmanship, Lowell charges him only with having revived the age of concetti while he fancied himself going back to a preclassical nature, basing the charge on such a far-fetched comparison as that in which Thoreau declares his preference for "the dry wit of decayed cranberry-vines and the fresh Attic salt of the moss-beds" over the wit of the Greek sages as it comes to us in the "Banquet" of Xenophon a kind of perversity of comparison all too frequent with Thoreau.
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