Gabriello Chiabrera (; 18 June 155214 October 1638) was an Italian poet, sometimes called the Italian Pindar. His "new metres and a Hellenic style enlarged the range of lyric forms available to later Italian poets." Chiabrera is routinely compared by Italian critics to his younger contemporary Giambattista Marino.
Biography
Early life and education
Chiabrera was born in Savona, a small coastal town near Genoa, into a family of patrician descent. As he states in a pleasant fragment of autobiography prefixed to his works, where, like Julius Caesar, he speaks of himself in the third person, he was a posthumous child; he went to Rome at the age of nine, under the care of his uncle Giovanni. There he read with a private tutor, suffered severely from two fevers in succession, and was sent at last, for the sake of society, to the Roman College, where he remained till his 20th year, studying philosophy, as he says, "rather for occupation than for learning's sake". but his tombstone bears two quaint Italian hexameters of his own, warning the gazer from the poet's example not to prefer Parnassus to Calvary. much of his work remains readable and pleasant. His grand Pindarics are dull, but some of his Canzonette, like the anacreontics of Ronsard, are elegant and graceful. His autobiographical sketch is also interesting. It reveals the simple poet, with his adoration of Greek (when a thing pleased him greatly he was wont to talk of it as "Greek Verse"), delight in journeys and sightseeing, dislike of literary talk save with intimates and equals, vanities and vengeances, pride in remembered favours bestowed on him by popes and princes, infinita maraviglia over Virgil's versification and metaphor, fondness for masculine rhymes and blank verse, and quiet Christianity. And although Croce echoed the more negative assessments of such nineteenth-century critics as Luigi Settembrini and Francesco de Sanctis, characterising Chiabrera's poetry as "incredibly arid and laboured," he still contrasted him with the "sensuous and mellow" Marino, whom he equally disliked. Indeed, in his attempt to give some conceptual rigour to the term "Baroque", Croce went so far as to separate Marino and Chiabrera in chapters entitled "Baroque poetry" and "Literary poetry", respectively.
Since Croce's time, few scholars have attempted to restore some of the lustre to Chiabrera's tarnished critical reputation and to focus attention once again on the innovative, indeed radical nature of his poetry. Chief among these has been Giovanni Getto, who, in a study provocatively entitled Gabriello Chiabrera: Baroque Poet has insisted that the innovative, experimental aspect of the poet's output should be seen as part of a larger movement in Italian poetry of the time. Manifesting itself in phenomena as diverse as the madrigals of Marino or the canzoni of Fulvio Testi, this movement, in defying many of the conventions of previous Italian poetry contrasted sharply with the more stable aesthetic of sixteenth-century verse. While Chiabrera's innovations were more muted, his novelties more subtle, he nevertheless was in his own way as much a radical as any of his contemporaries.