A Review of Petrarch's Canzoniere

Anyone even passingly familiar with the history of poetry can tell you something about Petrarch’s Canzoniere, beginning, no doubt, with the poet’s obsession with Laura, his idealized love interest. Still, the chances are that you know more about the poems’ influence than their contents: That, like his near-contemporary Dante, Petrarch helped legitimize the vernacular as a vehicle for serious poetry; that his earliest English translator, Geoffrey Chaucer, may have been encouraged by Petrarch’s use of the common tongue to write his own greatest works in English rather than Latin; that Wyatt and Surrey’s 16^th Century translation ignited the sonnet fad that continued through Shakespeare and flickers into our own era.