How Do I Love Thee? by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Read-along)

Sonnets from the Portuguese, written ca. 1845-1846 and first published in 1850, is a collection of forty-four love sonnets written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The poems largely chronicle the period leading up to her 1846 marriage to Robert Browning. The collection was acclaimed and popular even in the poet's lifetime and it remains so today.

Elizabeth was initially hesitant to publish the poems, feeling that they were too personal. However, her husband insisted that they were the best sequence of English-language sonnets since Shakespeare's time and urged her to publish them. To offer the couple some privacy, she decided that she might publish them under a title disguising the poems as translations of foreign sonnets. Therefore, the collection was first to be known as Sonnets from the Bosnian, until Robert suggested that she change their imaginary original language to Portuguese, probably after her admiration for Camões and his nickname for her: "my little Portuguese." The title is also a reference to Les Lettres portugaises.



Elizabeth Barrett Browning quotes