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The sonnet (The critical idiom)

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Fuller is the editor of the Oxford Book of Sonnets and has specialized in writing about this form. In this small introductory guide he devotes a chapter to the Italian sonnet , abba abba cde cde , and one to the English sonnet abab cdcd efef gg. He discusses the structural differences and variants of both sonnet forms. I will just include one paragraph of his book because it seems to to say a lot about the sonnet in a very condensed form.

" I have said little about the function of the sonnet, because even its slight form is capable of too much to be discussed adequately here. Its range is indeed very wide: from satire like that of Brooke, or Hood's more wistful and brilliant ' Sonnet to Vauxhall' through Shakespeare's wit and invective or Leigh hunt's grotesqueries to Milton's sublime scorn; from the wary tenderness of Wyatt to the intelligence and passion of Elizabeth Barret Browning, from Auden's potted literary biographies to Wordsworth's ecclesiastical history. Minutiae in Clare, generalities in Harley Coleridge, symbolism in Yeats, devotion and piety, doubt and effusion, political tributes, dedications, diary entries: the uses of the sonnet are not easily limitable." p. 37

For me as I believe for most people the sonnet is above all Shakespeare. And after that Wordsworth and Milton. The great star of Petrarch has never particularly shone for me perhaps because I do not know Italian. I would also mention Hopkins who I believe the greatest English practiconeer in the form from the nineteenth century to today.

This work is a useful guide, but the real guide and the real delight is reading the great sonnets.