Sonnets from the Portuguese
Sonnets from the Portuguese, written c. 1845–1846 and published first in 1850, is a collection of 44 love sonnets written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The collection was acclaimed and popular during the poet's lifetime and it remains so today. Despite what the title implies, the sonnets are entirely Browning's own, and not translated from Portuguese.
Phoebe Anna Traquair's illuminated copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese – Sonnet 30.
The Sonnets from the Portuguese, published by Adelaide Hanscom Leeson.
Image: Ludvig S Ipsen Sonnets from the Portuguese 1886 33rd sonnet header
Image: Ludvig S Ipsen Sonnets from the Portuguese 1886 33rd sonnet
A sonnet is a poetic form that originated in the poetry composed at the Court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the Sicilian city of Palermo. The 13th-century poet and notary Giacomo da Lentini is credited with the sonnet's invention, and the Sicilian School of poets who surrounded him then spread the form to the mainland. The earliest sonnets, however, no longer survive in the original Sicilian language, but only after being translated into Tuscan dialect.
The first five sonnets of Petrarch's Il Canzoniere
The title page of the first edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets
D. G. Rossetti's illuminated description of the sonnet, 1880
Mary Ellen Solt's concrete "Moonshot sonnet" (1964)