Virtue and Desire: Love in Petrarch’s Poetry

Abstract

Petrarch, famous for his sonnets, is one of the leading poets of the Renaissance. His love poems are widely circulated and have touched countless readers for nearly a thousand years. In his lyric poems, there is usually a constant heroine - Laura. Petrarch loved Laura as an earthly beauty and worshipped her as a saintess. This love does not demand perfection, nor even contact, as if the remaining poems as witnesses were enough. His unrequited love for Laura is one of the focuses of the study of Petrarch. For a long time, his love for Laura was often compared to the love presented in chivalry literature. This paper attempts to interpret this literature love from a philosophical perspective. Therefore, this paper will analyze Petrarch’s love for Laura based on philosophical concepts. By interpreting Petrarch’s love from a different perspective, readers can get closer to the nature of his love. According to different schools of philosophy, his love may be a kind of supreme good or just a kind of narcissism.