The sonnet form is one of the oldest and most popular poetic forms in European literature, having been invented in the thirteenth century and used since by poets as varied as Petrarch, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Tony Harrison, Carol Ann Duffy, and Simon Armitage. Below, we offer […]
The sonnet was popular among the Romantic poets. John Keats wrote many, including the celebrated ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’; Shelley gave us ‘Ozymandias’; and a pioneering female poet, Charlotte Turner Smith, was both a proto-Romantic poet and the person often credited with causing a revival of the sonnet […]
Written in the early 1580s, Astrophil and Stella is the first substantial sonnet sequence in English literature, and sees Sidney exploring his own life-that-might-have-been with Penelope Rich (whom he turned down), through the invented semi-autobiographical figures of ‘Astrophil’ (‘star-lover’) and ‘Stella’ (‘star’). Sonnet 41, which begins ‘Having this day my […]