Petrarch - Francesco Petrarca

'Petrarch deserves to be valued as a real man, a careful thinker, a good poet,' writes Nicholas Kilmer introducing his enlarged selection of the great Italian poet who lived from 1304 to 1374. Free in form yet holding close to the central impulses of Petrarch's inspiration, Kilmer's 'readings' in this bilingual edition present Petrarch as a confessional poet and a humane moralist of startling honesty. The book is divided into two parts: poems written during Laura's lifetime, and poems written after her death. In this last section Kilmer revisits Petrarch's poems many years after translating the poems of Laura's lifetime, thus completing his picture of Petrarch's abiding inspiration.