La duda y el conflicto en el proceso de elaboración del "Secreto Mío" de Petrarca

After being laureate in 1341, Petrarch, the poet who had sung love, poetry, beauty and, above all, Laura, started remarkably to feel the typical stress of a time of changes, ruptures and renewal of values, which led shortly afterwards to the great figures and doctrines of the Renaissance. The beliefs that the poet from Arezzo had defended until that moment began to collide and break up in many polarities that undermined both his works and life. Glory, beauty or pleasure, that pleased him until then, found the resistance from moral beliefs hard to achieve, an opportunity that Petrarch seized to create, with his vast culture, the Secretum, in which Saint Augustine, Seneca or Cicero, as models of virtue and the straight way, confront their ideas with the soul of a poet that is only devoted to beauty. The confrontation between these different behaviour patterns, their roots and resolution, will guide the way about to be covered in the following pages.