The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch

Pages: 773

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About this book

Francesco Petrarca, known in English as Petrarch (1304-1374), wrote the Italian love poems gathered here, together with his Triumphs and other verse. This London printing of 1879 offers them in English verse by many hands, among them Chaucer, Spenser and Leigh Hunt, because no single complete English version had existed before it.

Each sonnet or canzone carries its Italian first line, and favourite poems appear in several renderings so that a reader can compare them. Some are addressed to friends and patrons, such as the lines advising Stefano Colonna to follow up a victory, and one argues that poets give fame that marble cannot. Others speak of the poet's long love for Laura.

Before the poems comes a long life of Petrarch condensed from Thomas Campbell, with a year by year summary from his birth at Arezzo to his death at Arqua, and sixteen steel engravings of places and portraits.

About the author

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.