Amoretti Masterplots, Fourth Edition

The Poem

Edmund Spenser’s sonnet sequence, the Amoretti (meaning “little love gifts” in Italian), ranks among the most notable of the collections produced during the golden age of English poetry, also the heyday of the English sonnet. Beginning in fourteenth century Italy with Petrarch’s tributes, in sonnet form, to his beloved Laura, the sonnet cycle describing the lover’s pangs and the inamorata’s remote beauty quickly became a poetic standard. The introduction of this poetic form to England is generally credited to Sir Thomas Wyatt, who brought it from...

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