The period of literary transition between Augustan poetry and Romantic poetry has sometimes been described as the age of sensibility. The age of sensibility Įmma Hamilton demonstrating sensibility in the natural world, a 1789 print after George Romney In form they are modelled on Petrarch's, however, which to Capel Lofft is more legitimate than the Shakespearean quatorzain that closes in a couplet. Milton's sonnets deal with both personal and contemporary issues and in their organisation are reminiscent of the Horatian ode. The young Milton had learned the mature Italian style while travelling in Italy and conversing on equal terms with its writers (as well as writing five sonnets in Italian as well). In Italy (as in England), the sonnet had gone through periods of decline and renewal and Milton was the fittest model for the English revival. In the long preface to his idiosyncratic Laura, or an anthology of sonnets (on the Petrarchan model) and elegiac quatorzains (London 1814), the thesis is developed that beyond the sonnet's Sicilian origin lies the system of musical notation developed by the mediaeval Guido of Arezzo, and before that the musical arrangement of the Greek ode. Īt the start of the 19th century, Capel Lofft expressed his sense of the importance of the sonnet's history to the new generation of English poets. Charlotte Smith incorporated a few translations from Petrarch among her Elegiac Sonnets, while Anna Seward's sonnet "Petrarch to Vaucluse" is an imitation written in the poet's name. For that generation, Milton's example was the one generally followed, although the long history of the Italian sonnet was not forgotten, especially among women writers. After him, scarcely any sonnets were written until the form’s revival during the second half of the 18th century. The form was taken up by a host of other poets over the next century, for the most part composing long amatory sequences, although at the end of this period John Milton had demonstrated the sonnet’s adaptability to a much wider range of subject matter. The sonnet had been adopted into English poetry during Tudor times, notably by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who took Petrarch as their model and translated or adapted several of his sonnets into English. Experiments in making the sonnet more expressive and more adaptable still, begun by the later Romantic poets, were continued after their time.
Variations of both the Petrarchan sonnet and the Shakespearean sonnet were employed by the Romantic poets in the wake of the late 18th century revivalists of the form, who had applied the sonnet to a wider variety of subjects than in previous centuries. Separate sections of sonnets appeared in all three of his published collections: 21 sonnets in Poems Descriptive of Rural Scenery (1820) 60 in The Village Minstrel (1821) and 86 in The Rural Muse (1835). John Clare, whose early published poetry falls within this period, is a special case. But in the opinion of Lord Byron sonnets were “the most puling, petrifying, stupidly platonic compositions”, at least as a vehicle for love poetry, and he wrote no more than five. The sonnet was a popular form of poetry during the Romantic period: William Wordsworth wrote 523, John Keats 67, Samuel Taylor Coleridge 48, and Percy Bysshe Shelley 18. "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer", a portrait of John Keats by Joseph Severn
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