THE SONNET
PREPARED BY S. SREEKUMAR
In his The
Development of the Sonnet, Michael Spiller states that the sonnet is
‘probably the longest-lived of all poetic forms” and that almost all the major
poets of Britain, ‘with the exception of the Augustan poets’, have taken
to sonneteering at some time or other in their poetic career. John Fuller (in
his monograph on the sonnet) agrees with this view. He highlights some of the
reasons for the longevity of the genre:
