Chapter One will cover the period from Petrarch to Milton. Petrarch's greatest gift to posterity was the cycle of poems popularly known as his Canzoniere. The poems are full of humour, and are written in a tightly composed yet complex form, which record their speaker's unrequited obsession with the woman named Laura. In the centuries after it was designed, the "Petrarchan sonnet," inspired the greatest love poets of the English language-from the times of Spenser and Shakespeare to our own. Petrarch's love for Laura de Noves, was the inspiration behind Il Canzoniere. Chapter Two will be based on the metaphysical poets. The most famous metaphysical poets were John Donne (1572-1631), George Herbert, (1593-1633), Andrew Marvell (1621-1678). John Donne is considered the leading exponent of the metaphysical form. The word metaphysical means anything abstract, occult or transcendental and Samuel Johnson wrote that the 'The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavour'. The difference between the Elizabethan and Petrarchan sonnets is that Petrarch used closely related images such as love and a rose, whereas the metaphysical poets used unusual images which did not appear to correspond with each other. The most famous conceit is found in Donne's 'A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, ' where he uses the images of a compass to describe two lovers. Chapter Three will cover the Victorian period. After the age of John Milton, the sonnet form experienced a decline but it was revived during the Victorian period. Gerard Manly Hopkins' (1844-1889) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) were famous Victorian poets who wrote many excellent sonnets. Gerard Manley Hopkins was a famous English poet, who not only converted to Catholicism but also became a Jesuit priest. He wrote 'The Windhover' on 30 May 1877, and he dedicated the poem to Christ our Lord. Hopkins considered it one of his best poems. One of the paradoxes of Victorian sonnet writing is that while such poets as the Rossettis or Elizabeth Barrett Browning strive to maintain the personal intensity of the romantics, they also return to forms of the sonnet sequence, which they evidently consider improvements on their Elizabethan predecessors. But sequences like The House of Life, Monna Innominata, and Sonnets From The Portuguese have been completely transformed by the autobiographical shift of the romantics. Chapter Four will concentrate on contemporary sonnets. Although modern sonnets do not have to follow a particular pattern or rhyme scheme, at the same time, they are still expected to be fourteen lines long and to express a story, which is personal and memorable. Tony Barnstone is Professor of English at Whittier College. He has reinvented the sonnet, while retaining its basic form and comments: It is large enough to include Whitman and Borges, to include free-verse practices and aesthetics and Greek and Latin rhetoric, large enough to include experiments with line, stanza, and rhyme. Chapter Five will deal exclusively with Seamus Heaney's Glanmore Sonnets. The Glanmore Sonnets are found in the Field Work Anthology, which was published in 1979. The sequence consists of ten sonnets, and Heaney referred to them as "marriage poems." As Tony Curtis argues, "The references to Wordsworth and to Wyatt rather than Yeats, the choice of the sonnet sequence itself, these are clear expressions of a need to draw on the strengths of mainstream English literature." A line from Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon's 'Bop: The North Star' sums up the paradox of the sonnet: 'teach the sonnet's a cell-: now try to escape-'. The formulaic fourteen lines may seem like a cell but in fact as each century passes, the cell becomes a liberator. The rules may loosen and the form may be subverted or parodied but if the poet retains the basic form, if he bends the rules but does not break them, a sonnet or a sonnet sequence of staggering genius wil
