ABSTRACT
Petrarch’s achievement of a sequence of 317 sonnets and forty-nine other poems in praise of his love for one woman, his Laura, though it was imperfectly understood, was the glass of fashion and the mould of form for European sonneteers from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. But love is not the only occupation of the sonnet, nor was it for Petrarch himself; its astonishing success and persistence has to be explained by recourse to rather wider terms. The sonnet was invented about the year AD 1230, in southern Italy; and by the end of the thirteenth century1 abouta thousand sonnets had been written, almost all in Italian (that is, in one of the dialects of it), exploring most of the varieties of its form and most of the possibilities of its subject matter. Francis Petrarch (1304-74), writing in the middle of the century following, inherited an already very sophisticated poetic instrument. The sonnet came into the vernacular of Spain in the midfifteenth century, into the vernaculars of Britain and France in the early sixteenth, and into German in the early seventeenth.2 With the exception of the Augustan poets in Britain, there have been few major poets who have not attempted sonnets; and even today, when verse is freer, formally
speaking, than ever before, most contemporary poets-even such apparently wild men as e.e. cummings-have at least one or two sonnets among their lyrics. The existence of hundreds of thousands of sonnets in all the vernaculars of western Europe proves that, for 750 years at least, the sonnet has been challenging and satisfying the poetic imagination.
