Most of the following selections are short excerpts from critical essays touching on the sonnet form. At present, five complete essays are included--The Sonnet in England, Elizabethan Sonneteers, The Elizabethan Sonnet, The Sonnet-Series, The Sonnet, and General Survey of the American Sonnet. Also, just added, a link to a recent essay The Sonnet: Ruminations on Form, Sex, and History by Anthony Hecht and a Poet-Lore article on dialogue sonnets.

1575 George Gascoigne--From Certain Notes of Instruction.

1583 Sir Philip Sidney--From An Apology for Poetry.

1584 King James I of Scotland--From A Short Treatise on Verse.

1589 George Puttenham--From The Art of English Poesy.

1593 Gabriel Harvey--From Pierce's Supererogation.

1603 Samuel Daniel--From A Defense of Rhyme.

1619 William Drummond--From "Conversations with Drummond".

1687 Philip Ayres--From "Preface," Lyric Poems, Made in Imitation of the Italians.

1715 John Hughes--From "Remarks on the Shepherd's Calendar, etc.," The Works of Mr. Edmund Spenser.

1755 Samuel Johnson--From A Dictionary of the English Language.

1779 Samuel Johnson--From "Life of Milton," Lives of the English Poets.

1779 Ephraim Chambers--From Cyclopaedia: or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences.

1796 Samuel Taylor Coleridge--From Sheet of Sonnets.

1835 J. F. O. (from the Southern Literary Messenger)-- Something on Sonnets.

1857 S. Adams Lee (from the Ladies' Repository)-- English Sonnets and Sonnet-Writers (from the Making of America collection).

1880 Appletons' Journal (from Blackwood's Magazine)-- A Talk about Sonnets.

1880 James Ashcroft Noble--The Sonnet in England.

1885 William Minto--Elizabethan Sonneteers.

1886 William Sharp--The Sonnet: Its Characteristics and History.

1891 E. B. Brownlow--Curiosities in Sonnet-Literature.

1903 John Erskine--The Sonnet-Series.

1904 C. F. Johnson--From Forms of English Poetry.

1908 Sidney Lee --The Elizabethan Sonnet from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature at Bartleby.

1908 Prosser Hall Frye--The Elizabethan Sonnet.

1917 T. W. H. Crosland--The Sonnet and The Canon.

1930 Lewis G. Sterner--General Survey of the American Sonnet.

1997 Anthony Hecht--The Sonnet: Ruminations on Form, Sex, and History (from Antioch Review).

1997 Rafael Campo/Joyce Wilson--Of the Sonnet and Paradoxical Beauties: an interview with Rafael Campo (from The Poetry Porch).

1999 Anthony Robinson--The Sonnet in the Twentieth Century (from Able Muse: A Review of Metrical Poetry).