![]() This is likely the reason that these moments of praise fall to the same unbelievable hyperbole as the rest. His relationship to his various patrons was extremely difficult for him-he was paid a mere pittance and constantly drawn away from his writing to deliver bad news to the pope (if you're thinking that's a bad job, Ariosto would agree-the See nearly had him killed). He makes extensive use of metafiction, both addressing the audience by means of a semi-fictionalized narrator and by philosophical explorations of the art of poetry itself, and the nature of the poet and his patron.Īs with most epics, Ariosto's asides to the greatness of his patron are as jarring as any 30-second spot. Every knight is 'undefeatable', every woman 'shames all others by her virtue', and it does not escape Ariosto that making all of them remarkable only makes more obvious the fact that none of them are.Īriosto's style flies on wings, lilting here and there, darting, soaring. ![]() His use of hyperbole and oxymoron prefigures the great metaphysical poets, and like them, these are tools of his rhetoric and satire. ![]() Though Ariosto's unusual work is full of prejudice and idealism, it is constantly shifting, so that now one side seems right, and now the other. Perhaps it speaks more to the age I live in than that of the author, but I'm always surprised to find a reasonable, rational mind on the other end of the pen. ![]()
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