Trobar clus is a style of TROUBADOUR poetry that is characterized by deliberate obscurity, metrical complexity, allusive and difficult language, and intricacy of rhyme schemes. It is a closed or hermetic style of writing practiced by poets who wished to communicate mainly with those in the courtly audience they deemed intelligent, initiated, and therefore worthy of the troubadour’s song. The term combines the Provençal words trobar, or the composition of poetry, and clus, meaning “closed.” The invention of the trobar clus style is often credited to the early 12th-century Provençal poet MARCABRU, though the term was not known in his time. The attitude toward the audience implied by the style goes back even further to the first troubadour, WILLIAM IX, duke of Aquitaine, who ends one of his poems with the comment:
Concerning this vers, I tell you a man is all the more noble
As he understands it, and gets more praise
(Goldin 1973, 39, ll. 37–38)
But RAIMBAUT D’ORANGE is probably the key figure in the development and definition of the trobar clus style. In a famous TENSO, or DEBATE POEM, with his contemporary GIRAUT DE BORNELH, concerning the relative merits of different poetic styles, Raimbaut defends his use of the clus style by saying that many among his listeners are uneducated, and that to write in a style that pleases all of them would be to lower his standards:
I do not want my songs turned
into such a lot of noise; . . .
fools will never
be able to praise them,
for such have no taste and no concern
for the worthiest and most precious things.
(Goldin 1973, 203, ll. 15–21)
It was a matter of pride, then, for the poet to write in a style inaccessible to the vulgar. Giraut, on the other hand, defends the easier style called the TROBAR LEU. In a study of troubadour eloquence, Paterson generalizes that, after looking at what a number of the troubadours actually say about trobar clus, it is impossible to give a very specific definition of the style: “trobar clus is flexible and treated differently by different poets” (Paterson 1975, 93). But the exclusive nature of the verse was influential on DANTE, who speaks with Arnaut Daniel in the Purgatorio, and on later poets like Pound and Eliot.
Bibliography
■ Goldin, Frederick, ed. and trans. Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouvères: An Anthology and a History. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973.
■ Paterson, Linda M. Troubadours and Eloquence. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
Encyclopedia of medieval literature. 2013.