Petrarch
Renaissance Italian poet
Petrarch was a fourteenth-century Italian scholar and poet, often called the father of humanism.
His sonnets to Laura established conventions that shaped European love poetry for centuries—the idealized beloved, the suffering lover, the intricate wordplay.
Petrarchan sonnets follow his rhyme scheme; Petrarchan love describes refined, unrequited devotion.
Fourteen-line rhymed poems
- LauraWoman's given name
- CanzonierePetrarch's lyric poetry collection
- lyricSong's text
- verseMetered poetic passage
Italian · troubadour · rhyme · stanza · odes · elegies · vernacular · dolce
Woman's given name
- unrequitedNot returned in kind
- longingIntense, persistent desire
- devotionDeep, loyal commitment
- idealizedMade to seem perfect
beauty · obsession · passion · yearning · chaste · adoration · muse · beloved
European cultural reawakening
- classicalOf ancient Greece/Rome
- antiquityGreat age, ancient era
- CiceroAncient Rome's greatest speaker
- LatinAncient Roman language
manuscripts · scholarship · philology · rhetoric · Florence · letters · erudition · learning
sonnets
Fourteen-line rhymed poems
- LauraWoman's given name
- CanzonierePetrarch's lyric poetry collection
- lyricSong's text
verse · Italian · troubadour · rhyme · stanza · odes · elegies · vernacular · dolce · quatrain
Laura
Woman's given name
- unrequitedNot returned in kind
- longingIntense, persistent desire
- devotionDeep, loyal commitment
idealized · beauty · obsession · passion · yearning · chaste · adoration · muse · beloved · spiritual
Renaissance
European cultural reawakening
Latin · manuscripts · scholarship · philology · rhetoric · Florence · letters · erudition · learning · ancients
Shakespeare
Elizabethan dramatist and poet
blazon · imitation · English · sonneteers · convention · tradition · European · literary · Wyatt · Surrey
Avignon
French papal seat
Italy · medieval · Boccaccio · exile · wandering · diplomacy · coronation · Rome · patronage · courts
- literaturebooks, book, fiction, poetry, stories
- Italian HeritageRome, Florence, Venice, Vatican, Tuscany
- Classic AuthorsShakespeare, Dante, Homer, Chaucer, Milton
- Italian IconsLeonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Dante, Galileo, Marco Polo
- love poetrylove poems, love poem, love poetry, love sonnets, love sonnet
- poetspoet, Homer, Dante, Milton, Emily Dickinson
PetrarchMarquis de Sade
Writer whose name became perversion
Ovid · pornographer · Casanova · Don Juan · Henry Miller
PetrarchJonathan Swift
Dublin's savage satirist
doggerel · ribaldry · vulgarian · low comedy
- Petrarchan sonnetFourteen-line poem, octave-sestet structure