ABSTRACT
The Italian poet and critic Giosué Carducci, writing, as poets have often done, sonnets upon the sonnet, said that Dante gave the sonnet ‘the movement of cherubim, and surrounded it with gold and azure air’; Petrarch ‘plucked sonnets with flowers along a running brook’, and ‘poured into them the sighs of his heart, a divine stream murmuring through his verses’.1 A kind of theological ceremoniousness set against a pastoral hedonism-if the easy identification of Dante with sacred and Petrarch with profane love is unfair to the complicated souls of both men, it is still true that Petrarch’s Canzoniere, or Rime as I shall call them,2 his collection of 317 sonnets, 29 canzoni, 7 ballate and 4 madrigals, became the greatest single inspiration for the love-poetry of Renaissance Europe until well into the seventeenth century. The sonnet was not his creation, but it became his creature, and the self which its frame displayed, a rich and varied and complex one, became a mode of being in a form of discourse that few could escape if they tried to speak of love, whether they chose the sonnet itself or quite another form. The Rime of Petrarch is not only one of the most influential, but also one of the most complicated of European lyric achievements-more than eight hundred critical works on it have been published in the twentieth century alone3-and this chapter will be limited to considering his handling of the sonnet form, involving the larger issues of his life and the construction and meaning of the Rime only as far as these are relevant to the sonnet.
