All we know about Sordello as a poet is that he wrote some Italian poems.  Those by which he was famous were in Provencal.  In Dante’s treatise on the use of his native tongue, he suggests that Sordello was one of the pioneers of literary Italian.  So, at least, Browning seems to infer from the passage, for he makes it the motive of his little “excursus” on Sordello’s presumed effort to strike out a new form and method in poetic language.  Nothing was more needed than such an effort if any fine literature were to arise in Italy.  In this unformed but slowly forming thirteenth century the language was in as great a confusion—­and, I may say, as individual (for each poet wrote in his own dialect) as the life of the century.

What does Browning make Sordello do?  He has brought him to Mantua as the accepted master of song; and Sordello burns to be fully recognised as the absolute poet.  He has felt for some time that while he cannot act well he can imagine action well.  And he sings his imaginations.  But there is at the root of his singing a love of the applause of the people more than a love of song for itself.  And he fails to please.  So Sordello changes his subject and sings no longer of himself in the action of the heroes he imagines, but of abstract ideas, philosophic dreams and problems.  The very critics cried that he had left human nature behind him.  Vexed at his failure, and still longing to catch the praise of men, that he may confirm his belief that he is the loftiest of poets, he makes another effort to amaze the world.  “I’ll write no more of imaginary things,” he cries; “I will catch the crowd by reorganising the language of poetry, by new arrangements of metre and words, by elaborate phraseology, especially by careful concentration of thought into the briefest possible frame of words.  I will take the stuff of thought—­that is, the common language—­beat it on the anvil into new shapes, break down the easy flow of the popular poetry, and scarcely allow a tithe of the original words I have written to see the light,

                welding words into the crude
    Mass from the new speech round him, till a rude
    Armour was hammered out, in time to be
    Approved beyond the Roman panoply
    Melted to make it.”

That is, he dissolved the Roman dialect to beat out of it an Italian tongue.  And in this new armour of language he clothed his thoughts.  But the language broke away from his thoughts:  neither expressed them nor made them clear.  The people failed to understand his thought, and at the new ways of using language the critics sneered.  “Do get back,” they said, “to the simple human heart, and tell its tales in the simple language of the people.”