Which English poet wrote the sonnet sequence 'Sonnets from the Portuguese'?

The English poet who wrote “Sonnets from the Portuguese” was Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The collection contains 44 love sonnets and is one of the best-known works of Victorian poetry.

The sonnets were written during Barrett Browning’s courtship with fellow poet Robert Browning. She initially hesitated to publish them because they were intensely personal. Robert persuaded her to include them in a later edition of her Poems, and the sequence appeared in book form in 1850.

Despite its title, the collection was not translated from Portuguese. Barrett Browning used the name partly to disguise the poems’ autobiographical nature. Robert affectionately called her “my little Portuguese,” and the title also alludes to Portuguese literary associations, including the poet Luís de Camões and the seventeenth-century Letters of a Portuguese Nun.

Sonnet 43 is the collection’s most famous piece, beginning with the question “How do I love thee?” The sequence traces love through uncertainty, emotional restraint, spiritual aspiration, and eventual commitment. A common mix-up is to associate the work with Christina Rossetti or Emily Dickinson, other prominent nineteenth-century women poets; neither wrote this sonnet sequence.