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.