Canzoniere
Francesco Petrarcac. 1374Petrarch invented the idea of being in love with love itself.
Read this if you…
- want to read the inventor of the love sonnet
- don't care his poetry doesn't translate to english well
- want to read the guy who is credited with setting off the renaissance
Skip this if you…
- don't care about history of poetry/ sonnets
- are expecting it to sound as good as English language poets
Why It Matters
Petrarch invented the idea of being in love with love itself. His 366 poems to Laura set the template for love poetry in every European language: the unattainable beloved, the suffering poet, the obsessive cataloging of beauty and pain. Shakespeare, Spenser, and pretty much every sonneteer since is either copying Petrarch or pushing back against him.
The 
Take
A little one note and I know miss something not being able to read Italian. Still awesome historical piece of lit . The sun of my eyes
Where to go next
- Metamorphoses by Ovid. Canzoniere built on it. - The *Canzoniere* is built on a single Ovidian myth: Rvf 22 casts Laura as Daphne and the poet as Apollo, the laurel forever just out of reach - The governing pun — *Laura*, *lauro*, the laurel crown of poetry — only fully lands if you know Ovid's Daphne first - Rvf 23 models its sequence of transformations directly on the *Metamorphoses*; Petrarch turns Ovid's storytelling into a vocabulary for one man's obsession
- Confessions by Augustine of Hippo. Canzoniere built on it. - The book Petrarch carried in his pocket and read at the top of Mont Ventoux — Augustine's *Confessions* was his breviary - The *Canzoniere*'s long confessional self-scrutiny, above all the conversion canzone Rvf 264, maps onto Augustine's arc: the turn from Laura to the Virgin echoing Augustine's turn from the world to God - Read it first and the *Canzoniere* reveals itself as the *Confessions* made lyric — the same restless soul, now in verse
- The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. Canzoniere built on it. - The *Canzoniere* exists because Dante proved Italian verse could carry real weight — Petrarch followed him into the vernacular - He borrowed Dante's terza rima for the *Triumphs*, even as he wrote to insist he felt no jealousy of him (Familiares 21.15) - Read the *Commedia* first to see the giant Petrarch is at once building on and quietly measuring himself against
- The Aeneid by Virgil. Canzoniere built on it. - Behind these love-poems stands the poet Petrarch revered above all — he kept his treasured *Aeneid* for a lifetime, marking it with thousands of notes - On its flyleaf he wrote his lament for Laura, so Virgil and the *Canzoniere*'s beloved share the same physical page - Dido's grief shadows Petrarch's; reading Virgil's *Aeneid* first lets you hear how deeply the epic's voice runs under his vernacular song
- Shakespeare's Sonnets by William Shakespeare. Canzoniere shaped it. - Petrarch founded the tradition Shakespeare would spend a sequence arguing with — the Petrarchan love sonnet starts here - The *Canzoniere* gave English poetry its stock metaphors: eyes like the sun, lips like coral, the unattainable idealized beloved - Shakespeare engages and subverts all of it — Sonnet 130 mocks the very imagery the *Canzoniere* made standard
- The Complete English Poems by John Donne. Canzoniere shaped it. - Petrarch wrote the love-poem grammar that all of Europe spoke for three centuries — and Donne is one of his sharpest students - His conceits travel intact: the *Canzoniere*'s seas of tears and gales of sighs resurface in Donne's *A Valediction: of Weeping*, the amorous dream regenerated, the octave-and-sestet of his sonnets carried into Donne's Holy Sonnets - The greater debt is the one Donne pays by fighting it — see how a poet keeps Petrarch's hyperbole of the beloved while turning his reverence inside out
- Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. Canzoniere shaped it. - Petrarch invented the suffering lover — the worshipping, sighing, self-tormenting poet of *Canzoniere* — and gave Europe two centuries of imitators - Shakespeare writes Romeo as one of them: his pining for Rosaline is Petrarchism played straight, then mocked (Mercutio sneers that Laura was "but a kitchen-wench") - The lovers even meet inside a shared sonnet — pilgrim and saint — before the play breaks past the old convention
Depicted in Art
A pensive young woman in profile, head bowed, hair loosely bound, dressed in a soft Renaissance gown — an imagined portrait of Petrarch's beloved.
Alexandre Cabanel
Petrarch leans toward Laura in a garden setting, holding a book; she turns her face partly away, hand at her collar.
Nicaise de Keyser, 1842
Petrarch stands in scholar's robes in a niche, holding an open book, gazing out — a full-length portrait from the Uffizi's cycle of famous men.
Andrea del Castagno, 1450
Inside a medieval church, Laura turns slightly to acknowledge Petrarch's gaze as she hands alms to an old woman; candles are quenched at the altar behind them.
Marie Spartali Stillman, 1889
The procession continues: Fame on her chariot trumpeted by heralds, Time as a winged old man, then Eternity's celestial vision of God.
Francesco Pesellino, 1450
Petrarch encounters Laura outdoors among trees; she turns her head toward him with restrained recognition.
Josef Mánes
Recommended Editions
David Young
Farrar, Straus and Giroux · 2004
Young selects from the Canzoniere rather than translating all 366, and his English sonnets actually scan as poems. The obsession and the longing carry through. The readable Petrarch.
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Deep Dive
What It's About
This summary gives away plot details.
Notable Quotes
“You who hear the sound, in scattered rhymes, of those sighs on which I fed my heart, in my first vagrant youthfulness, when I was partly other than I am,”
“I find no peace, and yet I make no war: and fear, and hope: and burn, and I am ice:”