THE INVENTOR OF THE SONNET

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 821, 21 May 1910, Page 9

THE INVENTOR OF THE SONNET

From all the conflicting elements of Petrarch's character (writes AV. IA Courtney in tho London "Telegraph") tho vacillation of his own career, the imperfections of a temperament which was alnwsl too versatile to be great, omerges ono supreme and decisive fact, i Petrarch was not only a poet, but the creator of poets and pOotry; while, for all practical purposes, he was the invontor of tho sonnet, which played so important a part in tho literatures both of France and England in iho centuries succeeding ( him. We can sometimes see a man by studying thoso whom he influenced in later ages. The school of Petrarch in tho largest sense of the ,terni, consisted of a vwy distinguished body of imitative scholars. Wo aro not concerned with Franco, although men like Clement, Marot Du Bellay, and, above, all llonsard, exist to prove how direct and decisive was the Italian's influence. But let us turn to England alone, where wo shall find a continuous lino of imitators, .beginning, possibly, with Chaucer himself, and, of courses illustrated in the work of tho sixteenth century by names like Wyatt and Surrey. Both Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Earl of Surrey wrote sonnets closely based on tho Petrarchan model; and to them succeed George Gascoignc, Sidney, Spenser, and Watsou. Probably Philip Sidney is more thoroughly Petrarchan than any other Elizabethan writer. His Stella is another Laura,; a portrait drawn after her groat predecessor; and her creator was only to 'bo excelled by tho author of "The Faery Queene" in his knowledge of Italian literature And then comes Shakespeare, whose sonnets were certainly not directly baEed on Petrarch, because their structure is but whose spirit was deeply steeped in all Italian influences; and then William Drummond, of Hawthornden, the lino extending through Milton and Wordsworth down to Dante Gabriel Kossetti and Christina Rossetti, who wrote more accurate Petrarchan sonnets than any of the others.