Gabriello Chiabrera

Poet, born in Savona, Liguria, NW Italy. An eclectic writer, he composed heroic poems (Gotiade, 1582), melodramas and pastoral dramas (Rapimento di Cefalo, 1600), tragedies (Erminia) and others. His adaptation of classical prosody to traditional verse deeply influenced the Arcadia movement.

Gabriello Chiabrera (June 18, 1552 – October 14, 1638) was an Italian poet, sometimes called the Italian Pindar.

He was of patrician descent, and was born at Savona, a little town in the domain of the Genoese republic, twenty-eight years after the birth of Pierre de Ronsard, with whom he has far more in common than with the great Greek whose echo he sought to make himself. 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 Jesuits' College, where he remained till his twentieth year, studying philosophy, as he says, "rather for occupation than for learning's sake".

Losing his uncle about this time, Chiabrera returned to Savona, "again to see his own and be seen by them." His revenge of an insult offered him obliged him to betake himself once more to Savona, where, to amuse himself, he read poetry, and particularly Greek.

The poets of his choice were Pindar and Anacreon, and these he studied till it grew to be his ambition to reproduce in his own tongue their rhythms and structures, and so to enrich his country with a new form of versein his own words, "like his country-man, Columbus, to find a new world or drown." but he seldom quitted Savona, though often invited to do so, saving for journeys of pleasure, in which he greatly delighted, and for occasional visits to the courts of princes whither he was often summoned, for his verse's sake, and in his capacity as a dramatist.

He died in 1637, at the patriarchal age of eighty-five.

A maker of odes in all their elaborate pomp of strophe and antistrophe, a master of new and complex rhythms, a coiner of ambitious words and composite epithets, an employer of audacious transpositions and inversions, and the inventor of a new system of poetic diction it is not surprising that Chiabrera should have been compared with Ronsard. The simple old poet, with his adoration of Greek (when a thing pleased him greatly he was wont to talk of it as "Greek Verse"), his delight in journeys and sight-seeing, his dislike for literary talk save with intimates and equals, his vanities and vengeances, his pride in the memory of favours bestowed on him by popes and princes, his infinita maraviglia over Virgil's versification and metaphor, his fondness for masculine rhymes and blank verse, his quiet Christianity, is a figure deserving perhaps of more study than is likely to be bestowed on that "new world" of art which it was his glory to fancy his own, by discovery and by conquest.