Sonnets are a very old form of formal verse, dating back to just after the Middle Ages. Through the past several centuries, sonnets have traditionally dealt with large yet intimately experienced human concerns, such as love, time/eternity, and occasionally death. In strict terms, a sonnet is a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter; many sonnets, especially those written before the twentieth century, rhyme. However, the form has evolved over the centuries.
Early Italian writers of sonnets, such as Petrarch (who popularized the sonnet form, writing sonnets in Italian to his beloved Laura), employed a sonnet form known today as the Italian, or Petrarchan, sonnet. This sonnet's rhyme scheme consists of eight lines rhymed abbaabba and a concluding sestet rhymed in "various groupings of cde" (Hollander, 19).
The sonnet form was popularized in England by Sir Philip Sidney who, in his book Stella and Asphodel, chronicled his love affair with the beautiful Stella and the conflict that this presented to him between his lust and his religious beliefs. Shakespeare, along with most of the other poets of his day, took the sonnet form and capitalized upon it.
After the Elizabethan era, the sonnet fell into disfavor
among most poets, scholars, and critics of poetry, who viewed it as an
artificial and overly contrived form. By 1833, M. Guizot stated in
Shakspeare and His Times, an overview of Shakespeare's
works, that the sonnets were an aside, interesting only to hardcore Shakespeare-philes,
and that Shakespeare would be remembered only for his great plays, not
for the sonnets or his long poems (Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece,
and The Phoenix and the Turtle):"His sonnets - fugitive pieces which the poetic and sprightly grace of some lines would not have rescued from oblivion but for the curiosity which attaches to the slightest traces of a celebrated man - may...cast a little light on the obscure or doubtful portions of his life; but, in [sic] a literary point of view, we have in future to consider him only as a dramatic poet."(Guizot, 65)
However, it is worth noting that Guizot also completely dismissed the play Titus Andronicus as a Shakespearean work when, today, it is almost universally recognized as a play written by Shakespeare.
The sonnet form began to rise again in popularity towards the end of the nineteenth century, and is still a popular form today. During the twentieth century, poets began to tweak the sonnet form in accordance with the general movement away from so-called 'formal' poetry and towards free verse. Although such modern poets as Marilyn Hacker still wrote traditional sonnets, complete with fourteen lines in iambic pentameter and a rhyme scheme (although in a distinctly contemporary voice), other poets (e.e. cummings and Alan Dugan spring to mind, along with a host of others) have tinkered with the sonnet form, loosening the meter, breaking apart lines, and either changing or departing entirely from 'standard' rhyme schemes. Still more poets, like Adrienne Rich in her "Twenty-One Love Poems", write poems that cannot be classified as sonnets, yet make the reader think of sonnets by bringing back the ghosts of iambic meter, common sonnet themes, and occasionally even a closing pair of sonnet-like lines.
Sonnet 43 -