ABSTRACT
Of Italian poetry and, more particularly, of the Italian sonnet from Petrarch to Tasso, I cannot claim more than a slight and superficial knowledge. The quantity, published and unpublished, must be so vast that there is probably no scholar who has read it all, and certainly no scholar able to remember even what he has read well enough to enable him to make confident generalisations about the presence or absence of significant treatments of particular topics. On this topic of poetic immortality the only really memorable utterances that I have been able to discover are in three sonnets of Tasso. There may well be many more in many other poets, and although some might say that, if they were really memorable, we should have heard of them by now, I do not myself feel able to anticipate their possible production with such easy assurance—true though it be that I strongly doubt whether the most diligent investigator would be able to produce enough memorable poetry to disprove my assertion about the joint pre-eminence, on this topic, of Horace and Shakespeare.
