Knowra Petrarchan sonnet Petrarchan sonnet A sonnet form shaped by an eight-line octave and six-line sestet, often turning between a problem and its response. Its conventions of unattainable love draw on Francesco Petrarca’s poetry.
Octave : An eight-line stanza, or the first eight lines of a sonnet. The octave establishes the situation or emotional pressure that the sestet answers.
Francesco Petrarca : A fourteenth-century Italian poet and humanist, known in English as Petrarch. His lyrics to Laura established enduring themes and conventions associated with the form.
Thomas Wyatt : An English poet who helped introduce the sonnet and other Italian forms into English poetry. His adaptations helped establish the Petrarchan sonnet in English.
Shakespearean sonnet : A sonnet form organized into three quatrains and a closing couplet, usually rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Its quatrains and couplet contrast with the Petrarchan octave and sestet.
Sestet : A six-line stanza, or the final six lines of a sonnet. The sestet develops the response or change following the octave.
Canzoniere : Petrarch’s collection of Italian poems, chiefly sonnets, about love, loss, and spiritual struggle. Its poems became a principal source for the tradition’s themes and formal models.
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey : An English poet who helped shape the English sonnet and blank verse in the sixteenth century. His formal innovations influenced how English poets adapted Italian sonnets.
Spenserian sonnet : An English sonnet form with interlocking ABAB BCBC CDCD EE rhymes. Its linked quatrains replace the Petrarchan octave’s enclosing rhyme pattern.
Volta : A rhetorical or thematic turn in a poem, often marking a shift in argument or feeling. The turn commonly separates the octave’s predicament from the sestet’s reply.
Laura de Noves : A woman traditionally identified as the Laura celebrated in Petrarch’s love poetry. The idealized, inaccessible beloved in Petrarch’s poems shaped the tradition’s love conventions.
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