Sonnet is a 14-line poem in a fixed rhyme scheme, typically meditating on love, time, or mortality.
The sonnet was perfected in 13th-century Sicily and brought to literary maturity by Petrarch in 14th-century Italy, whose 'Canzoniere' addressed 366 poems to an idealised woman, Laura. The Italian or Petrarchan sonnet divides into an eight-line octave and a six-line sestet, with a turn or 'volta' at the ninth line. Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey imported the form into English in the 16th century; Shakespeare reshaped it into three quatrains and a closing couplet. Across centuries, the sonnet has survived every stylistic revolution because its compression — fourteen lines is just enough room for an argument and its reversal — fits how thought actually moves. From John Donne to Edna St. Vincent Millay to Terrance Hayes's 'American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin' (2018), poets keep returning to it as the most resilient short form English has.