Strategies of Failure in the Early Modern Sonnet - Petrarch, Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Wroth

This book offers an ambitious reassessment of the post-Petrarchan tradition. Elegantly and lucidly written, it examines the uses of failure as a poetic strategy in the Petrarchan sonnet sequence—a strategy that originated with Petrarch and was then imitated and developed in the English Renaissance lyric.