Michelangelo, who considered himself as primarily sculptor, afterwards painter, disclaimed the character of poet by profession. He was nevertheless prolific in verse; the pieces which survive, in number more than two hundred, probably represent only a small part of his activity in this direction. These compositions are not to be considered merely as the amusement of leisure, the byplay of fancy; they represent continued meditation, frequent reworking, careful balancing of words; he worked on a sonnet or a madrigal in the same manner as on a statue, conceived with ardent imagination, undertaken with creative energy, pursued under the pressure of a superabundance of ideas, occasionally abandoned in dissatisfaction, but at other times elaborated to that final excellence which exceeds as well as includes all merits of the sketch, and, as he himself said, constitutes a rebirth of the idea into the realm of eternity. In the sculptor’s time, the custom of literary society allowed and encouraged interchange of verses. If the repute of the writer or the attraction of the rhymes commanded interest, these might be copied, reach an expanding circle, and achieve celebrity. In such manner, partly through the agency of Michelangelo himself, the sonnets of Vittoria Colonna came into circulation, and obtained an acceptance ending in a printed edition. But the artist did not thus arrange his own rhymes, does not appear even to have kept copies; written on stray leaves, included in letters, they remained as loose memoranda, or were suffered altogether to disappear. The fame of the author secured attention for anything to which he chose to set his hand; the verses were copied and collected, and even gathered into the form of books; one such manuscript gleaning he revised with his own hand. The sonnets became known, the songs were set to music, and the recognition of their merit induced a contemporary author, in the seventy-first year of the poet’s life, to deliver before the Florentine Academy a lecture on a single sonnet. Diffusion through the printing-press, however, the poems did not attain. Not until sixty years after the death of their author did a grand-nephew, also called Michelangelo Buonarroti, edit the verse of his kinsman; in this task he had regard to supposed literary proprieties, conventionalizing the language and sentiment of lines which seemed harsh or impolite, supplying endings for incomplete compositions, and in general doing his best to deprive the verse of an originality which the age was not inclined to tolerate. The recast was accepted as authentic, and in this mutilated form the poetry remained accessible. Fortunately the originals survived, partly in the handwriting of the author, and in 1863 were edited by Guasti. The publication added to the repute of the compositions, and the sonnets especially have become endeared to many English readers.

A bilingual edition of the more than 300 sonnets, madrigals and other poems produced by Michelangelo over his long career. The poems reveal much of the artist's inner feelings about such universal themes as love, death and redemption.

Though known primarily as a sculptor and painter, Michelangelo was also a poet. In his lifetime, Michelangelo wrote over 300 poems, many of which were works of devotion and love poems of a spiritual and mystical nature. In 1961, Joseph Tusiani offered the first English translations of the complete corpus of Michelangelo’s poems. These translations illuminated the subtleties of both the source and target language, giving Michelangelo’s verse a freshness, a depth, and an inventiveness that time has not been able to obscure. The Complete Poems of Michelangelo reproduces Tusiani’s masterful translation. In addition to Tusiani’s introduction and translations, this new edition contains Michelangelo’s original Italian poetry, a chronology of his life and works, a biographical profile of Tusiani, and an interview with Tusiani exploring his musings on classic literature and the subtle art of translation. The Complete Poems of Michelangelo sheds light on Tusiani’s many exceptional accomplishments during his long and prolific life as a scholar, poet, translator, and artist.

The genius of Michelangelo as architect, sculptor and painter was recognised by his European contemporaries. Only recently has he been acknowledged as the greatest Italian lyric poet of his generation. From the time he was thirty he wrote verse all his long life, but what turned him into a great poet was his encounter at the age of fifty-seven with Tommaso de'Cavalieri, a young Roman nobleman. The versions given here are of the sonnets and madrigals generated by his love for Cavalieri. Whether that love was ever physical is debatable. It was certainly 'metaphysical', and in their conceptual toughness and power these poems anticipate the work of the English poets of that description. The themes are light and dark, cold and the fever of flesh and damnation, helplessness in the face of young beauty, hope for the divine countenance. Immortalized in these poems, Cavalieri has another aspect. Vasari tells us Michelangelo did a full-length cartoon of him. If Aretino is right, millions have admired his features - in all probability Christ in the Sistine Chapel Last Judgement is a portrait of Tommaso de'Cavalieri.

New translations by Joseph Tusiani of Michelangelo’s little-known but highly memorable verse.

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