The word 'sonnet' is derived from the the Italian word sonetto, meaning a little song. As originally conceived the sonnet was a highly stylised 14-line poem written in iambic pentameter, known as the Petrarchan sonnet. Introduced in England in the Sixteenth Century, Shakespeare modified the rhyming scheme to create what is known as the Shakespearean sonnet. Over the centuries poets have chosen to further vary the form, but quintessentially it is "a moment's monument", as Dante Gabriel Rossetti described it. Here are some of the best in the English language:
- William Shakespeare - Sonnet 116
- William Shakespeare - Sonnet 130
- William Shakespeare - Sonnet 18 (Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?)
- William Shakespeare - Sonnet 29
- William Shakespeare - Sonnet 30
- William Shakespeare - Sonnet 57
- William Shakespeare - Sonnet 73
- John Donne - Holy Sonnet 10, Death, Be Not Proud
- John Milton - On his blindness
- William Wordsworth - The World Is Too Much with Us
- William Wordsworth - Upon Westminster Bridge
- Percy Bysshe Shelley - Ozymandias
- Gerard Manley Hopkins - Pied Beauty
- Gerard Manley Hopkins - The Windhover
- Emma Lazarus - The New Colossus
- WB Yeats - Leda and the Swan
- Edna St Vincent Millay - Sonnet
- Wilfred Owen - Anthem For Doomed Youth
- ee cummings - i carry your heart with me
- Pablo Neruda - Love Sonnet XI
- Alice Oswald - Sonnet
- Alice Oswald - Wedding