The Sonnet

            The Sonnet has been a popular form in Western literature for five centuries. There are many reasons for the popularity of the sonnet and one is certainly its form. The history of the sonnet form's development shows that it has outlived all the periods of literature. The sonnet form was developed in the early 13th century among the Sicilian school of court poets. The first person to write sonnets was Francis Petrarch. He wrote the first sequence of love sonnets addressing an idealized woman called Laura. In his sonnets Petrarch praises her beauty and perfection by using various metaphors (usually connected with natural beauties). The sonnet form spread throughout Europe to England where Sir Thomas Wyatt introduced it to readers in translating Petrarch in the 16th century. He and also Henry Howard used the sonnet for love poems of a particular type. They were both influenced by Petrarch and saw the lover as dutiful, anxious and full of praises of his mistress, whereas the mistress was seen as proud, unreceptive and very desirable. Changes have emerged in the fashion of writing from time to time but poets have always returned to the compact fourteen lines. In the Elizabethan period the sonnets advanced into a form with new metric and rhyme scheme that was departing from Petrarchan sonnets, though they still carried the Petrarchan conceit (that is to say a comparison between dissimilar things). It was during this time that Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare and Donne experimented with the sonnet form. The metaphors Petrarch used had become a cliché in Shakespeare's day and in the sonnet 130 Shakespeare himself plays a joke on the conventions of love poetry of his time. For example he compares nature and the mistress by saying that "her lips are red as coral- and "her breasts are white as snow-. .
             Sonnets were also written during the height of classical English verse by for example Pope and Dryden, and the sonnet form outlived even the Romantic period when they emphasized freedom and usually did not prefer a very strict form like sonnets.