Petrarchism
Quick answer: Petrarchism is the imitation of Petrarch's sonnets, with idealised beloveds, paradoxes and blazons, that dominated European love poetry for centuries.
Petrarchism is the imitation of the style, themes and conventions of the Italian poet Petrarch, whose 14th century sonnet sequence for an idealised woman named Laura became the template for European love poetry for the next three hundred years. Its trademark moves include the unattainable, quasi-divine beloved; the suffering, self-analysing lover; paradoxes such as burning in ice and freezing in fire; and the blazon, a head-to-toe catalogue comparing the lady's features to suns, pearls and roses.
Understanding Petrarchism gives you two things at once: a key to reading Renaissance poetry, since Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare all write inside or against it, and a permanent lesson in how conventions harden into clichés, and how strong poets renew them.
The poem
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
William Shakespeare, 'Sonnet 130' (1609)
From Petrarch to a European Fashion
Petrarch's Canzoniere, some 366 poems mostly about Laura, perfected the Italian sonnet as an instrument for examining desire, guilt and time. In the 16th century, Pietro Bembo promoted Petrarch as the model for all serious lyric, and the fashion crossed every border: Ronsard in France, Garcilaso in Spain, and in England Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey, whose translations and adaptations introduced the sonnet to English and, in Surrey's case, reshaped its rhyme scheme into the form Shakespeare inherited. By the 1590s, sonnet sequences to idealised mistresses were practically compulsory for ambitious English poets.
The Backlash That Kept It Alive
Conventions this successful invite mockery, and anti-Petrarchism became a tradition of its own. Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 is the famous example, cataloguing everything his mistress is not, no sun-like eyes, no coral lips, and ending that she is as rare as any woman misrepresented by false comparisons. The joke only works because readers knew the clichés by heart. Sincerity and parody thus fed each other, and the Petrarchan toolkit survived precisely because poets kept quarrelling with it.
What It Teaches Working Poets
Petrarchism is the best documented case study of imagery inflation: comparisons that dazzled in 1340 were furniture by 1590. The practical lesson is to audit your own love poems for inherited stock, stars, roses, oceans, and either cut it or turn it visibly on its head. Contest judges reading hundreds of love poems reward exactly that freshness of language, and the anti-Petrarchan poem is the oldest proof that honesty about a real, imperfect person outcharms idealised marble.
What poets can take from this
- Read a few Canzoniere poems in translation before the imitators, so you know the source from the copies.
- List the standard Petrarchan comparisons, then ban them from your next love poem.
- Try one honest blazon: catalogue a real person's features with accurate, affectionate detail instead of jewels and suns.
- Use paradox sparingly; one true contradiction outweighs five decorative ones.
- When you inherit any convention, ask what Shakespeare asked: what happens if I say the opposite?
Try it yourself
Write an anti-blazon for someone you love: ten lines cataloguing their unglamorous, specific features, chipped tooth, terrible laugh, paint-stained hands, so that the accumulation becomes the compliment.
Questions
What are the main features of Petrarchan poetry?
An idealised, unattainable beloved; a lover who anatomises his own suffering; paradoxes like freezing fire; elaborate comparisons of the beloved to natural and precious things; and, formally, the sonnet, often in a sequence.
What is anti-Petrarchism?
Poetry that mocks or reverses Petrarchan conventions while depending on the reader knowing them. Shakespeare's Sonnet 130, which denies its mistress every stock comparison, is the classic English example.
Is Petrarchism the same as the Petrarchan sonnet?
No. The Petrarchan sonnet is a form, fourteen lines split into octave and sestet, while Petrarchism is a whole style and set of themes. You can write a Petrarchan sonnet with no Petrarchist conventions, and vice versa.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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