The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch

Petrarch's Canzoniere is essentially the original heartbreak poetry collection: 366 poems written across forty years, tracking an entire lifetime of obsessive, unrequited love for a woman named Laura. The poems chronicle Petrarch's private crisis as he grapples with desire and spiritual torment, body and soul, the unbearable gap between the woman he cannot have and the words he cannot stop writing. The sequence moves from radiant descriptions of Laura's beauty, through years of longing and despair, to the devastating poems written after her death from plague in 1348, and finally to a kind of religious resolution. Petrarch invented the modern language of love before that language existed: the ache, the repetition, the way a single face colonizes a mind. Every love sonnet written in the five centuries that followed, from Shakespeare to the Romantics, echoes these poems. What makes Petrarch endures is not his reverence for Laura but his honesty about his own instability, his willingness to admit that the greatest poet of his age was also completely undone by desire.