Ever since his childhood he had made verses from an impelling need of expression. He covered his drawings, his letters and loose sheets of paper with thoughts in verse which he took up again and again, corrected and worked over ceaselessly. We have only a very few of these poems of his youth, for he burned many of them in 1518 with some drawings. He did not think them of value until he met the banker Luigi del Riccio and Donato Giannotti, who advised him to publish a collection of them. Donato took the matter up seriously about 1545. Michelangelo made a selection from his poems and his friends recopied them. But the death of Riccio in 1546 and perhaps also that of Vittoria in 1547 distracted him from this thought of worldly fame, and the poems remained unpublished until his death. Nevertheless they were passed from hand to hand and the most famous composers of the time, G. Archadelt, Bartolommeo Tromboncino, Costanzo Festa, Consilium--Italians, Frenchmen and Flemings--set his madrigals to music. Cultured people admired them, and Varchi, reading and commenting on one of these sonnets in 1546 before the Academy of Florence, declared that it had the clarity of the classic and the richness of the thought of Dante.
Michelangelo was in fact nourished on Dante. "No one understood him better or knew his works more perfectly," says Donato Giannotti, who placed him as arbiter in his dialogues on Dante in 1545.[53]
Michelangelo dedicated to Dante one of his most beautiful sonnets in which he envied his exile and his glory:
Fuss'io pur lui! c'a tal fortuna nato, Per l'aspro esilio suo con la virtute Dare' del mundo il più felice stato.[54]
He knew equally well all the other classics of Italian lyric poetry, Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia and Petrarch. His style is wrought from theirs, but his thought is entirely his own.
"You speak words only, but he speaks in deeds," wrote Francesco Berni to the poets of his time.
Tacete umquanco pallide viole Et liquidi cristalli et fere snelli: Et dice cose, e voi dite parole.[55]
It is true that this was not achieved without a great obscurity of thought, remarked even by his contemporaries and which to us often makes their reading very difficult.