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. Petrarch's sequence established the fourteen-line form with an octave (eight lines) posing a problem or observation and a sestet (six lines) offering a turn or resolution — a structural pivot known as the 'volta.' When the sonnet crossed into English in the 16th century via Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey, it acquired a new architecture better suited to English's rhyme-poor vocabulary: three quatrains and a closing couplet, rhymed ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Shakespeare perfected this English (or Shakespearean) form across 154 sonnets, frequently saving his sharpest reversal for the final couplet rather than the Italian volta's mid-poem turn. Milton later revived the Italian structure for weightier, more argumentative subjects, and by the 19th century poets from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Gerard Manley Hopkins were straining the form's constraints to fit new subjects — grief, faith, the body — while keeping its essential discipline of compression. The form has never gone dormant: 20th-century poets from Auden to Seamus Heaney to contemporary spoken-word poets continue to write within or explicitly against the sonnet's fourteen-line frame, often using its inherited weight — centuries of love poetry — ironically or subversively. Few literary forms have proven this durable across seven hundred years of changing language, belief and subject matter.