POE - The Sonnet Lesson

Much of the nature of sonnets arises from one simple characteristic of their form: sonnets are short. Sonnets therefore develop a single, self-contained topic, often as a first-person expression of the speaker's emotions. When a poet chooses to write a sonnet, he or she participates in a tradition of writers who have spent centuries exploring the limits and possibilities that a fourteen-line form creates. Every word and beat of a sonnet, even more than those of other traditional verse, carries a heavy burden of tradition and association, calling to mind an Italian tradition identified with Petrarch, an English tradition identified largely with Shakespeare and Milton, and generations of later sonneteers who have revised and adapted the sonnet tradition.

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