Canzoniere (Songbook)
366 poems addressed to Laura, the woman Petrarch loved at a distance for decades. The collection invented the sonnet sequence and defined romantic love poetry for five centuries. The "Petrarchan" conventions (the unattainable beloved, the suffering lover, the paradoxes of desire) saturated Shakespeare, Sidney, and Spenser. The form is his gift; the obsession beneath the form is his genius.
Petrarch worshipped Laura from across a church and wrote three hundred sixty-six poems about it. She is an occasion, never quite a person, and the machinery (fire and ice, sweet suffering, the paradox du jour) repeats until the conventions parody themselves; later poets built careers mocking them. Read straight through, decades of obsession without development argue for an anthology instead.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
