Fifteen Sonnets of Petrarch by Francesco Petrarch

Fifteen Sonnets of Petrarch by Francesco Petrarch

FRANCESCO PETRARCH: FIFTEN SONETS FROM PETRARCH

Selected by Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Edited by Cassidy Hughes

Francesco Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304-1374) is the supreme poet of love in the Western tradition, alongside poets such as Sappho and William Shakespeare. Francesco Petrarch is also the Renaissance artist and humanist par excellence. Petrarchism is termed the longest poetic tradition in the Occident, and Petrarch has influenced poets such as Maurice ScEve, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Torquato Tasso, Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, Joachim Du Bellay, Pierre de Ronsard, Rainer Maria Rilke and Robert Graves, among hundreds of others.

Petrarch's Canzoniere, often also known as the Rime Sparse, lies at the heart of his achievement: it comprises 366 poems about love, written in Italian and worked on right up until Petrarch's death in 1374. In the Canzoniere, there are hundreds of sonnets, 29 canzoni, 7 ballate, 9 sestine and 4 madrigali. Petrarch's other major works included Secretum, Triumphs, Africa, De Vita Solitaria, verse epistles, biographies, allegorical ecologues and hundreds of letters.

Includes a note on Francesco Petrarch, a bibliography, a timeline, and a gallery of pictures.

92 pages. www.crmoon.com

Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch until English speakers, was an Italian poet who grew up and lived in and around Avignon, France, from 1304 to 1374. On Good Friday in 1327, he claimed, he beheld for the first time a beautiful, God-fearing, and married woman named Laura in church. He completed his first collection of Italian lyric poems by the end of 1337, and was named poet laureate in Rome in 1341. Petrarch spent the next thirty years or more finishing his masterpiece, Canzoniere, Rime sparse, and Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, which chronicled the speaker's unrequited love for Laura both while she was alive and after she died of bubonic plague in 1348.