''Sonnets from the Portuguese'', written ca. 1845–1846 and published first in 1850, is a collection of 44 love sonnets written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The collection was acclaimed and popular during the poet's lifetime and it remains so.

Title

Barrett Browning was initially hesitant to publish the poems, believing they were too personal. However, her husband

Robert Browning Robert Browning (7 May 1812 – 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose dramatic monologues put him high among the Victorian poets. He was noted for irony, characterization, dark humour, social commentary, historical settings ...

insisted they were the best sequence of English-language sonnets since

Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...

's time and urged her to publish them. To offer the couple some privacy, she decided to publish them as if they were translations of foreign sonnets. She initially planned to title the collection "''Sonnets translated from the Bosnian''", but Browning proposed that she claim their source was

Portuguese Portuguese may refer to: * anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal ** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods ** Portuguese language, a Romance language *** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language ** Portu ...

, probably because of her admiration for Camões and Robert's nickname for her: "my little Portuguese". The title is also a reference to '' Les Lettres Portugaises'' (1669).

Numbers 33 and 43

The most famous poems from this collection are numbers 33 and 43:

Number 33

Number 43

References

External links