'How do I love thee' Elizabeth Barrett Browning?

Question

Why did Browning write her sonnet in the Petrarchan style and not the Shakesperean style like the rest of the poets in the victorian era?

Answer 1

I don't know how many "Victorians" you've read, but many Romantics had a strong liking for the Petrarchan over the Shakespearean sonnet.

Here's one from Keats on the Sonnet:

http://www.web-books.com/classics/poetry/anthology/Keats/OnSonnet.htm

Answer 2

maybe she wnated to show her ondividualism and not just follow the crowd and maybe this just worked better for her!
See the trouble with writing anything in a shakesperean style is that u'll never quite measure up to his genius and his witty way with words,so say i...but u need not agree with me!
And anyway, try puting her poem in the shakesperean style and u'll find that it doesn't flow as well nor does it sound as good!!!
Try it!
Or like most women trying to get ahead in any field,she was probably a bit headstrong and went against the advice she was given by someone else to go with the Shakesperean style out of sheer orneryness! LOL!
But i digress,maybe u shud go on some of those poetry sites and ask a real buff coz these are just my own musings!!!

Answer 3

Well, maybe because it offered more of a challenge:

"Shakespearian Sonnet

The Shakespearian sonnet has the simplest and most flexible pattern of all sonnets, consisting of 3 quatrains of alternating rhyme and a couplet:
Not only is the English sonnet the easiest in terms of its rhyme scheme, calling for only pairs of rhyming words rather than groups of 4, but it is the most flexible in terms of the placement of the volta. Shakespeare often places the "turn," as in the Italian, at L9:"
"The Petrarchan sonnet on the contrary, consists of a rigid scheme in the octave."

But begging the question in YOUR question, the "rest of the poets in the Victorian Era" did NOT use only the Shakespearian sonnet.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti also used it extensively - see first link below, please.

And this:

"Many English writers—including William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning—continued to write Petrarchan sonnets. One of the best-known examples of this in English is Wordsworth's “The World Is Too Much With Us”:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste
our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me
less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathéd horn.
In the later 19th century the love sonnet sequence was revived by Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in The House of Life (1876). The most distinguished 20th-century work of the kind is Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnette an Orpheus (1922)."

see second link please

And this:

"Petrarchan sonnets are harder to write than Shakespearean sonnets and are much less common. The following example, by the poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, is about one of his own paintings, The Day Dream, which is now in the collections of the V&A.

The Day-dream

THE thronged boughs of the shadowy sycamore
Still bear young leaflets half the summer through;
From when the robin 'gainst the unhidden blue
Perched dark, till now, deep in the leafy core,
The embowered throstle's urgent wood-notes soar
Through summer silence. Still the leaves come new;
Yet never rosy-sheathed as those which drew
Their spiral tongues from spring-buds heretofore.

Within the branching shade of Reverie
Dreams even may spring till autumn; yet none be
Like woman's budding day-dream spirit-fann'd.
Lo! tow'rd deep skies, not deeper than her look,
She dreams; till now on her forgotten book
Drops the forgotten blossom from her hand."

see third link, please.