Giacomo da Lentini

Giacomo da Lentini, also known as Jacopo da Lentini or with the appellative Il Notaro, was an Italian poet of the 13th century. He was a senior poet of the Sicilian School and was a notary at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Giacomo is credited with the invention of the sonnet. His poetry was originally written in literary Sicilian, though it only survives in Tuscan.

Although some scholars believe that da Lentini's Italian poetry about courtly love was an adaptation of the Provençal poetry of the troubadours, William Baer argues that the first eight lines of the earliest Sicilian sonnets, rhymed ABABABAB, are identical to the eight-line Sicilian folksong stanza known as the ''Strambotto''. Therefore, da Lentini, or whoever else invented the form, added two tercets to the ''Strambotto'' in order to create the 14-line Sicilian sonnet.

As with other poets of the time, he corresponded often with fellow poets, circulating poems in manuscript and commenting on others; one of his main correspondents was Pier della Vigna. Some of his sonnets were produced in ''tenzone'', a collaborative form of poetry writing in which one poet would write a sonnet and another would respond, likewise in a sonnet; da Lentini cooperated in this manner with the Abbot of Tivoli. Provided by Wikipedia