What's the Word? Petrarch and Love Poetry

From: Modern Language Association
Length: 29:17

A look at how many contemporary ideas about love come from the love sonnets of fourteenth-century Italian poet Francesco Petrarch Read the full description.

Piece Audio

Playing: What's the Word? Petrarch and Love Poetry
From: Modern Language Association

Petrarch_small Love at first sight, longing for an unrequited love, glorifying the beloved--all these notions, so familiar to us today, are centuries old, as we can see in the poetry of the Italian humanist and scholar Francesco Petrarch. In his fourteenth-century sonnet cycle, composed over many decades, Petrarch glorified a woman named Laura, who never returned his love. In the centuries that followed, his work influenced not only everything from love poetry to greeting cards to popular songs but also the way we think about love. David Wallace talks about Petrarch's sonnets, Dympna Callaghan discusses how Shakespeare changes the Petrarchan sonnet in __Romeo and Juliet__, and Anne Lake Prescott gives us some examples of anti-Petrarchan Renaissance poetry. Fifteen- and thirty-second promos available.

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Piece Description

Love at first sight, longing for an unrequited love, glorifying the beloved--all these notions, so familiar to us today, are centuries old, as we can see in the poetry of the Italian humanist and scholar Francesco Petrarch. In his fourteenth-century sonnet cycle, composed over many decades, Petrarch glorified a woman named Laura, who never returned his love. In the centuries that followed, his work influenced not only everything from love poetry to greeting cards to popular songs but also the way we think about love. David Wallace talks about Petrarch's sonnets, Dympna Callaghan discusses how Shakespeare changes the Petrarchan sonnet in __Romeo and Juliet__, and Anne Lake Prescott gives us some examples of anti-Petrarchan Renaissance poetry. Fifteen- and thirty-second promos available.