Yet apparently it encouraged him to persevere in literature, his
qualifications for tragical authorship being "a resolute spirit, very
obstinate and untamed, a heart running over with passions of every
kind, among which predominated a bizarre mixture of love and all its
furies, and a profound and most ferocious rage and abhorrence against
all tyranny whatsoever; ... a very dim and uncertain remembrance of
various French tragedies seen in the theaters many years before; ...
an almost total ignorance of all the rules of tragic art, and an
unskillfulness almost total in the divine and most necessary art of
writing and managing my own language." With this stock in trade, he
set about turning his Filippo and his Polinice, which he wrote first
in French prose, into Italian verse, making at the same time a careful
study of the Italian poets. It was at this period that the poet Ossian
was introduced to mankind by the ingenious and self-sacrificing Mr.
Macpherson, and Cesarotti's translation of him came into Alfieri's
hands. These blank verses were the first that really pleased him; with
a little modification he thought they would be an excellent model for
the verse of dialogue.
He had now refused himself the pleasure of reading French, and he had
nowhere to turn for tragic literature but to the classics, which he
read in literal versions while he renewed his faded Latin with the
help of a teacher.
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