Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles: Delia - Diana

Before Shakespeare wrote his sonnets, he read these. Henry Constable's "Diana" and Samuel Daniel's "Delia" are the forgotten ancestors of some of the most famous love poems in English, two sonnet sequences from the 1590s that helped invent the Elizabethan style. Here you'll find the raw, aching emotion that came before the Bard polished it into perfection: longing, despair, and obsessive love rendered through elaborate Renaissance metaphors of burning hearts, endless tears, and beauty that wounds. The poets competed fiercely in their devotion, each claiming the superior suffering, and their work shows why they were admired by their contemporaries and later revived by Wordsworth and Coleridge. These are poems about love as torment, beauty as cruelty, and poetry as the only way to immortalize feelings that cannot be returned. If you've ever been moved by Shakespeare's sonnets, these are the sequences that shaped them.