sonnet

Genre of 14-line poem of Italian origin introduced to England by English poet Thomas Wyatt in the form used by Italian poet Petrarch and followed by English poets John Milton and William Wordsworth; English playwright and poet William Shakespeare wrote 14-line sonnets consisting of three groups of four lines (quatrains) and two final rhyming lines (a couplet), following ] the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg.

The sonnet was very popular in Elizabethan literature and some of the finest lyric poetry of the period was written in the sonnet form. The sonnet sequence enjoyed a vogue during the 1590s, when several remarkable collections appeared, including Astrophel and Stella (1591) by English poet Sir Philip Sidney, Delia (1592) by English poet Samuel Daniel, and Amoretti (1595) by English poet Edmund Spenser. It was during this period that Shakespeare wrote his sonnet sequence.