Petrarch

An Italian poet and scholar of the fourteenth century whose collection of vernacular love poems for a woman he called Laura, the Canzoniere, fixed the Italian sonnet as a vehicle for interior emotional address and became the model European poets imitated, adapted and reacted against for the next three centuries. His sonnets are built from an eight line octave that states a problem or mood and a six line sestet that turns to answer, reflect on or complicate it, a structure now called the Petrarchan or Italian sonnet to distinguish it from the English variant later developed by Surrey and Shakespeare. Petrarch also revived interest in classical Latin literature and is widely credited as an early figure of Renaissance humanism.