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This article focuses on the inner dialogue of Petrarch who, in his Secretum, assumes two identities in order to converse with Saint Augustine on the themes of sin and the soul, culminating in a veritable public confession. It then explores the tendency of the poets of all eras to hold a dialogue with their soul or their heart, a topos inaugurated by the emperor Adrian and taken up again, precisely, by Petrarch in his Canzoniere. This rhetorical device gives access to a form of deep introspection and, at the same time, to an efficient re­presentation of the dynamic that brings the contrary feelings present within the autor’s soul into relationship with each other. The topos of the dialogue with the soul is a variant of the dialogue with the heart: the melancholic tone of this poetic genre makes this dialogue structure very appropriate to the sensibility of romantic authors, and in particular of Leopardi. In this atmosphere another version of this theme also emerges, and is illustrated, for example, by Musset, in a song where personal or private debate prevail over the alternative between fidelity in love and libertinism.