The peculiar appropriateness of Tasso's compliment arises from the fact that Stigliani was then engaged upon an epic on the discovery of America, which was far from justifying Torquato's predictions.
The style of Marini, however, was not allowed to bear unchallenged sway. The first place in lyrical poetry was boldly claimed by, and by many accorded to, another bard, whose personal and poetical idiosyncrasies stood in strong contrast to the Neapolitan's. Gabriello Chiabrera (1552–1637), a native of Savona, was a man of antique mould, haughty, aspiring, and self-sufficing. His youth was spent at Rome. Jealous of his honour, he found himself, as he tells us in his autobiography, necessitated to wash out sundry affronts in blood, which he accomplished to his satisfaction, but whether in single combat or in other fashion he does not explicitly say. Retired for safety to his native Ligurian town, and digesting the large assortment of ideas which he had brought away with him from the literary circles of Rome, he hit upon the great discovery of his life, that the Italian canzone needed to be reformed upon a Greek model. It really was a discovery which changed the whole course of his literary activity—of no such importance as that of the need of a closer observation of nature which Wordsworth deduced from noticing the blackness of a leaf outlined against a sunny sky, but still a genuine discovery. Its value lay not so much in its abstract worth or in any real assimilation of the spirit of Greek poetry by Chiabrera, but in an endeavour after a high standard, which, even when misdirected, proved the best corrective of the inanity and effeminacy to which the Italian canzone had become prone.
Chiabrera might be somewhat conventional in style
