The word "sonnet" comes from the Italian sonnetto, a word that means "little sound." The first master sonneteer was Petrarch, who gave his name to the Petrarchan (also called Italian) sonnet: a poem of fourteen lines in which a situation or problem is presented in the opening eight lines (the octave) and then resolved or complicated in the remaining six (the sestet). The rhyme scheme of the octave is abba, abba; that of the sestet is cde, cde or (in the case of "Sonnet XXIX") cdc, dcd. The meter is iambic pentameter (ten syllables per line of alternating unstressed and stressed syllables). Sonnets became popular in England in the sixteenth century, when poets such as Sir Thomas Wyatt, Samuel Daniel, and Edmund Spenser began to employ (and toy with) the form. English interest in the sonnet eventually led to the creation of different...