adjective

• Denoting a sonnet of the kind used by the Italian poet Petrarch, with an octave rhyming abbaabba, and a sestet typically rhyming cdcdcd or cdecde.

  ‘Throughout the Sonnets, Barrett Browning deliberately invokes the Petrarchan sonnet tradition only to revise it according to her own historical moment.’

  More example sentences

  • ‘Consisting of sixteen lines rhymed in four abba quatrains, the Modern Love sonnets at least visually acknowledge both Tennyson's In Memoriam and the Petrarchan sonnet tradition.’
  • ‘By Wroth's day, such Petrarchan sonnets would have been considered standard, established, sanctioned, and, primarily, conservative.’
  • ‘As we shall see, both negative and positive representations of such Catholic practices and identities abound in early modern visual images, sermons, and, for our purposes, Petrarchan poems.’
  • ‘In Tottel's 221, the poet's revision of Petrarchan neoplatonism relies upon contemporary Catholic religious sensibilities that centralize the body in worship.’