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Sonnets from the Portuguese

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"I love your verse with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett...and I love you too," Robert Browning wrote in January of 1845, thus initiating the most celebrated literary correspondence of the nineteenth century. For the next twenty months, he and the world-renowned poet Elizabeth Barrett exchanged letters and confidences. During their courtship, Elizabeth privately wrote a series of forty-four sonnets to Robert. Later, the sonnets were collected and called Sonnets from the Portuguese, after the folktale lovers Caterina and Camoens, who loved from afar. This new edition of Sonnets from the Portuguese presents the poems in an entirely new context. The large page size allows the sonnets the stature they deserve, and each poem is accompanied on the facing page with relevant excerpts from the love letters.