ABSTRACT
Rilke places Louise Labe, whose sonnets he translated, in his pantheon of great lovers, women whose love surpasses the loved one, who refuse to let the loved one become their limited objective, a substitute for the beyond to which they aspire. The love described by Rilke is bound to make the loved one increasingly dispensable. In Labe's particular case, this might also involve the gradual shaking off, during the course of her twenty-four sonnets, of the insistent, objectifying idealization of the loved one embodied in the 'masculinized' Petrarchan model. Rilke undertook the translation of Barrett Browning's Portuguese sonnets in March and April 1907, and in so doing implicitly admitted her to the ranks of great lovers. Several critics have pointed out ways in which Elizabeth Barrett Browning critically re-positions the sonnet conventions within which she writes.
