Sonnet 18

“If no love is, O God, what fele I so?,” by Petrarch

This early 21-line poem, translated into Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer, epitomizes the form the Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch invented. Though it is not 14 lines, it focuses on the theme of love. Though it is a contemplation of love, like Shakespeare’s later sonnet, it is solipsistic in nature, focusing on the speaker’s anguish from “this wondre maladie” (Line 20) which—contrary to Shakespeare’s love in “Sonnet 18”—is not a life-giving force, but one that makes the speaker wish for death.

“Scorn not the Sonnet,” by William Wordsworth

Wordsworth’s address to critics who have scorned or diminished the value of the sonnet takes the reader through its formal history by alluding to those who have contributed the most memorable lines of verse—Petrarch and Shakespeare; Italian poet Torquato Tasso; Portugal’s greatest poet, Luïs de Camões (here “Camöens”); and English poets Edmund Spenser and John Milton. Like Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton elevated the form by experimenting with it. Dante Alighieri—of The Inferno notoriety—is mentioned to illustrate how his work in terza rima offered the formal basis from which the sonnet could form. The sonnet, in the speaker’s view, is not a form to be discarded; instead, he wishes that there were more of them.