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Hello, the sonnets the most enduring form in the poet's armory for four or five hundred years

It's fourteen lines of exercise poetic minds from Petrach and Shakespeare to Milton Wordsworth Keats, Wilford Owen, Orden and Heaney

It's inspired the dueling verse of sonneteering and

Captulated the political perspectives of Oliver Cromwell and J.F. Kennedy and most of all it's provided a way to meditate upon love

Dante Gabriel Rosetti called it the moment's monument

What is it about the sonnets that's inspired poets to bind themselves by its strictures again and again?

With me to discuss the idiosyncratic allure of the sonnets and the use that it's been put to by poets over the centuries is the distinguished critic

Professors of Frank Cameron author of many books including Shakespeare's language also where this is Phyllis Levin poet in residence and professor of English at

Hofstra University in the author of a fourth-coming book the penguin book of the sonnets and we join to by Jonathan Bait King

Alfred professor of English at the University of Liverpool author of several books including Shakespeare and Ovid

Just to start right at the beginning Jonathan. Can you tell us what a son it is and define the different the two main different sorts of sonnets

Yes, I suppose it's one of the first things that school children learn about poetry is that a sonnet is a poem that has 14 lines

There are a few exceptions to that

But the form originated as a 14 line form and that is how it stayed all through the centuries

it's a form that began in Renaissance Italy and

Petraque the Italian Renaissance poet was the great early practitioner of it and the form of his sonnets had an

86 division so an idea would be set up in the first eight lines where there would be a rhyme running all the way through

That was known as the octave and then there'd be what's called a turn a twist of ideas up the end of the eighth line

And the second half called the Cestet the remaining six lines would sort of give a kind of counter argument to the beginning

That form was imported into England in the 16th century by Cautier poets notably a poet called Thomas Wyatt

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