of the two poets might be multiplied indefinitely. Yet they had much in
common. Both stood above their age, and in a sense aloof from it. Both
approached poetry in the spirit of thinkers bent upon extricating
themselves from the trivialities of contemporary literature. The
sonnets of both alike are contributions to philosophical poetry in an
age when the Italians had lost their ancient manliness and energy. Both
were united by the ties of study and affection to the greatest singer
of their nation, Dante, at a time when Petrarch, thrice diluted and
emasculated, was the Phoebus of academies and coteries.

This common antagonism to the degenerate genius of Italian literature
is the link which binds Michael Angelo, the veteran giant of the
Renaissance, to Campanella, the audacious Titan of the modern age.


II.

My translation of Michael Angelo's sonnets has been made from Signor
Cesare Guasti's edition of the autograph, first given to the world in
1863.[1] This masterpiece of laborious and minute scholarship is based
upon a collation of the various manuscripts preserved in the Casa
Buonarroti at Florence with the Vatican and other Codices. It adheres
to the original orthography of Michael Angelo, and omits no fragment of
his indubitable compositions.[2] Signor Guasti prefaces the text he has
so carefully prepared, with a discourse upon the poetry of Michael
Angelo and a description of the manuscripts. To the poems themselves he
adds a prose paraphrase, and prints upon the same page with each
composition the version published by Michelangelo Buonarroti in
1623.[3]