How The Complete English Poems drew on Canzoniere
A documented line of influence: John Donne demonstrably engaged Francesco Petrarca’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Canzoniere
Francesco Petrarca · c. 1374
MedievalThe influenced
The Complete English Poems
John Donne · 1633
PoetsRelevance
6/10
On The Complete English Poems’s page
- Donne writes against Petrarch from inside Petrarch — The Sun Rising takes the Canzoniere's reverent sun-address and makes it irreverent, the same hyperbole aimed the opposite way
- The specific conceits are inherited: the seas of tears and gales of sighs reworked into A Valediction: of Weeping, the amorous dream regenerated, the Holy Sonnets cut to Petrarch's octave-and-sestet form
- Read the Canzoniere first and Donne stops looking like a rebel without a tradition — you see exactly what he's wrenching out of shape
On Canzoniere’s page
- Petrarch wrote the love-poem grammar that all of Europe spoke for three centuries — and Donne is one of his sharpest students
- His conceits travel intact: the Canzoniere's seas of tears and gales of sighs resurface in Donne's A Valediction: of Weeping, the amorous dream regenerated, the octave-and-sestet of his sonnets carried into Donne's Holy Sonnets
- The greater debt is the one Donne pays by fighting it — see how a poet keeps Petrarch's hyperbole of the beloved while turning his reverence inside out