The Sonnet

This is a book about one of the oldest and most popular forms of poetry, the sonnet, which is a short poem of 14 lines, often used in love poetry. Shakespeare’s sonnets are among the best-known examples of the form, but it was used by Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and many other poets, right through to the present. Many women writers have used the sonnet, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Carol Ann Duffy, and it has been widely used in America (by Robert Frost, for instance) and in Ireland (by W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney). The book traces the history of the sonnet from medieval Italy to modern Britain, showing why the sonnet is such an attractive form for writers and explaining how it works in terms of shape and rhyme scheme. It includes a detailed study of many famous poems, including sonnets by Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Auden, and Heaney.