B. History of Sonnet in England

The sonnet made a late appearance in English literature. Early in the sixteenth century, the sonnet found its way to the Tudor court through Wyatt and Surrey. Even then the point of the Italian form was not entirely grasped, for Wyatt's sonnets all ended with a couplet, and Surrey, after some experimentation, used a pattern of alternately rhymed quatrains, which encouraged logical exposition right up to this final couplet and postponed the turn.

Wyatt adhered to the Petrachan octave but it was Surrey who established the accepted English form, a pattern more congenial to the comparatively rhyme-poor English language. This pattern was used extensively for there was wide variety in rhyme schemes and lines lengths. It was brought to its finest representation by Shakespeare. A rhyme scheme more attractive to Spenser (and in its first 9 lines paralleling his Spenserian stanza) was in effect a compromise between the more rigid Italian and the less rigid English patterns.

It remained for Milton to introduce the true Italian pattern (in fact, five of his sonnets are written in Italian), to break from sequences to occasional sonnets, to give a greater unity to the form by frequently permitting the octave to run into the sestet (the "Miltonic" sonnet, but anticipated by the Elizabethans), and a greater richness to the texture by employing his principle of "apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another," as in his blank verse. Milton's was the strongest influence when, after a century of disuse, the sonnet was revived in the later 18th century by Gray, T. Warton, Cowper, and Bowles; and reestablished in the early 19th by Wordsworth (also under Milton's influence but easing rhyme demands by use of an abbaacca octave in nearly half of his more than 500 sonnets); and by Keats, whose frequent use of the Shakespearean pattern did much to reaffirm it as a worthy companion to the generally favored Miltonic-Italian. Hopkins wrote Italian-form sonnets in an original way and W.H. Auden continued to write in a form tending towards the Italian.