Other meanings of Sonnet
Poetry
A sonnet is a compact lyric poem, usually of fourteen lines, organized by a characteristic rhyme scheme and a developing argument, image, or emotional turn. The form originated in medieval Italy and became one of the most adaptable structures in European and world literature.1
A sonnet concentrates a lyric argument within a short, highly patterned form. Its fourteen lines are commonly written in iambic pentameter in English, although meter and line length vary across languages and periods.1 The poem may address love, mortality, religious faith, politics, art, or an abstract idea. Formal features provide pressure rather than a fixed subject: a speaker often introduces a problem or proposition, develops it through comparison or reasoning, and reaches a shift called a volta. The turn may occur near line nine, before the final couplet, or at another strategically charged point. Sonnets can therefore resemble miniature arguments as well as songs, combining intellectual progression with concentrated sound and imagery.
The two most influential English-language patterns are the Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets. The Petrarchan sonnet, associated with Francesco Petrarch, divides into an octave and sestet, commonly rhyming ABBAABBA followed by varied sestet patterns; the turn often falls between the two parts.1 The Shakespearean pattern uses three quatrains, usually rhymed ABAB CDCD EFEF, and a closing rhyming couplet, often GG.3 Edmund Spenser linked the quatrains through interlocking rhymes, producing ABAB BCBC CDCD EE. These schemes are conventions, not laws: poets alter rhyme, syntax, meter, and division to make the form serve a particular voice.
The sonnet entered English literary culture during the Renaissance and became a vehicle for both imitation and innovation. William Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, including poems about desire, time, beauty, rivalry, and poetic survival; their sequence is not a simple autobiography, and its speaker, addressees, and narrative relations remain subjects of interpretation.3 English poets also used the form beyond courtly love. John Milton adapted it for religious and political reflection, while later writers such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Gerard Manley Hopkins reshaped its rhetoric and rhythm.2 Modern poets may retain fourteen lines while loosening rhyme or meter, demonstrating that the sonnet can preserve formal memory without repeating earlier subjects.
The sonnet has always been more flexible than its stereotype suggests. Italian, English, Spenserian, and other patterns coexist, and poets have produced sonnets with linked sequences, experimental rhyme, unusual lineation, or no regular rhyme at all.4 Some sonnets are written in languages whose poetic meters do not correspond to English iambic pentameter; translation therefore involves recreating effects rather than mechanically preserving form. The closing couplet in a Shakespearean sonnet can deliver a conclusion, reversal, qualification, or deliberate anticlimax, while a Petrarchan sestet may complicate rather than solve the octave's premise. Sonnets have also appeared in cycles and crowns: a sonnet crown links the last line of one poem to the first line of the next, with a final poem assembled from those linked lines.
The names of sonnet forms describe recurring conventions; individual poems may depart substantially from their standard patterns.
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