‘Illegal Attachments’: The Amatory Sonnet Sequence

Abstract

Part of the reason for the rather belated revival of the amatory sonnet sequence was unquestionably the dominance of the Miltonic-Wordsworthian sonnet, but there were aspects of the amatory tradition itself which rendered it problematic for nineteenth-century poets and critics.¹ Its origins in the work of Petrarch and his numerous imitators gave it associations with insincerity and impropriety which proved difficult to eradicate, and the biographical emphasis in sonnet criticism which helped to mitigate the first offence only increased the seriousness of the second.² Ever since the Abbé Jacques François de Sade revealed in the eighteenth century that Petrarch’s ‘Laura’ was not, as had often been supposed, a mere Platonic idealisation of beauty but a married woman, it became more difficult to see Petrarch’s love poetry as an arid intellectual game, but also more difficult to justify its existence on moral grounds.³ In his posthumously published introduction to The Book of the Sonnet, Leigh Hunt notes that numerous sonnet sequences from the earlier periods of the form’s existence ‘turn upon illegal attachments… [nobody] would dream, from [Petrarch’s] three hundred sonnets, that there was a gentleman of the name of De Sade, who had a right to ask him “what he meant”’.⁴ Byron’s observation in Don Juan is equally pointed:

• There’s doubtless something in domestic doings,

• Which forms, in fact, true love’s antithesis;

• Romances paint at full length people’s wooings,

• But only give a bust of marriages;

• For no one cares for matrimonial cooings,

• There’s nothing wrong in a connubial kiss:

• Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife,

• He would have written sonnets all his life? (III, 11. 57–64)