Francesco Petrarca

Francesco Petrarca, commonly known in English as Petrarch, was a fourteenth-century Italian poet and scholar whose lyric verse helped establish the form later called the Petrarchan sonnet. Fifteen Sonnets of Petrarch presents a small bilingual selection from that tradition, with Italian and English arranged on facing pages. Thomas Wentworth Higginson selected and translated the poems, and Houghton Mifflin issued the finely printed volume in 1903 through the Riverside Press in Cambridge. The collection concentrates Petrarca's meditations on love, memory, distance, beauty, and spiritual conflict into a brief historical edition. Library records also preserve its limited production of 430 copies and identify Petrarca as the author under his Italian name. By bringing the original lines beside Higginson's English versions, the book lets readers compare poetic structure, imagery, and translation choices rather than encountering the sonnets only through later literary influence.