The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio.

Hello, happy holidays. We're over the hump of Christmas and sliding towards the new year,

and I am cleaning up our archives. These are the shows that for one reason or another have fallen out of our archive.

Been lost for a while. Today we reclaim an episode that's all the way from 2018, the Sonnet.

I'm dusting it off, sprucing it up, cutting out the extraneous material, and delivering the goods like Santa Claus,

arriving a few days late. Maybe you could say we've returned the gifts that didn't quite fit,

and we're exchanging it for one that is the right size and color. Happy holidays. Okay, let's get started. I'm Jack Wilson, and this is an episode on

the history of the sonnet. It's one of the simplest and best known forms in all of poetry,

and since the 13th century, it's been the vehicle for some of the

greatest expressions of love and other subjects in the history of thought. A sonnet, said the poet,

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, is a moment. Who invented the sonnet and who brought it to prominence?

How has it changed over the years?

And why does this form continue to be so compelling?

Let's jump right in and hear from the most famous practitioner of sonnets, William Shakespeare.

This is Shakespeare's Sonnet 18.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

and summer's lease hath all too short a date.

Sometime too hot, the eye of heaven shines, and often is his gold complexion dimmed,

and every fair from fair sometimes declines, by chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed.

But thy eternal summer shall not fade, nor lose possession of that fair thou oest.

...