‘Tis I am mortal proved, and she divine.” “She ruled in beauty o’er this heart of mine,Īnd now her time for heavenly bliss has come, Thanks in large part to Petrarch, writing sonnets became all the rage in Elizabethan England, when poets like Sir Walter Raleigh, Michael Drayton and, most famously, William Shakespeare composed sonnet sequences. The kind of poems he wrote have come to be known as Petrarchan sonnets, poems of fourteen lines divided by their rhymes into one section of eight lines and one section of six. They were the only poems he wrote in Italian, and he didn’t consider them very important, but they’re what most of us know him by today.
When he stopped off in Arezzo on the way from Rome to Padua, he was invited to visit the house of his birth, which had already been converted to a memorial in his honor.Īfter Petrarch’s death, a book of sonnets was published about a woman named Laura-the Canzoniere (1374), or “Song Book.” He wrote the sonnets in his free time during the last forty years of his life.
People made pilgrimages from all over southern Italy and France to see him. It had been hundreds of years since Roman officials had given anyone that title, and in his acceptance speech Petrarch gave what some historians call “the first manifesto of the Renaissance,” about the revival of interest in classical culture.īy the end of his life, Petrarch was one of the most famous men in Europe. He wrote epic poems in Latin that he hoped would make him famous-and they did: in 1341 he was crowned Poet Laureate of Rome. In 1347, Petrarch supported a failed attempt to establish an ancient Roman-style republic. His father became so fed up with his interest in Roman literature that he threw all of his books by Latin authors into a fire. He read Cicero and Virgil obsessively, and he spent his adolescence traveling through Europe in search of old Latin manuscripts. More than anyone else from his age, he advocated for the restoration of classical Roman literature and politics. He’s usually considered to have lived just before the Italian Renaissance movement in art and literature began, but he was one of the most important influences on Renaissance artists and writers. It’s the birthday of the Italian humanist, scholar, and poet Francesco Petrarca, better known as Petrarch, born in Arezzo, Italy (1304).
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