Sonnets from the Portuguese

These forty-four sonnets read like love letters intercepted before they could be sent, urgent, intimate, trembling with the fear of being seen. Written in secret during Elizabeth Barrett Browning's courtship with Robert Browning, they chronicle the precise moment a reclusive poet, confined to her father's house and her own frailty, allowed herself to be found. The sequence moves from doubt to surrender, from "I love no more" to the famous declaration that love has "depth and breadth and height" the soul can reach. Barrett Browning nearly burned them. She publish them disguised as translations from a fictional Portuguese poet, hoping to shield their personal origin. Robert Browning convinced her otherwise, calling them the best English sonnets since Shakespeare. He called her "my little Portuguese," and she named the collection after that term of endearment. The result is one of the most passionate love sequences in the language, poems that feel like watching someone learn, in real time, that they are worthy of being loved.