VARIATIONS AND FORMS OF THE ENGLISH SONNET (PART II)
The Variation of the English Sonnet Wang and Niu finds that the difficulty in writing an English sonnet in the Italian form was because the main instinct in English poetry is for iambic or occasionally anapestic movement and most English poetry seems to shape itself in lines of five feet in each line. Also, there are far more vowels sounds in English than in Italian and hence fewer words to each sound, so it is harder to find rhyming words in English than in Italian (41). The Elizabethan Age The first sonnets in English were written by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, both closely associated with the court of Henry VIII. Some of these sonnets are rough translations and versions of Petrarch as well as sonnets that were dealt with decorum, conduct, and eloquence, articulating the values and attitudes of English court life. Wyatt and Surrey’s were collected and posthumously published b...
