Originating in Italy, the sonnet was established by Petrarch in the 14th century as a major form of love poetry, and came to be adopted in Spain, France and England in the 16th century, and in Germany in the 17th. Although largely neglected in the 18th century, the sonnet was revived in the 19th by Wordsworth, Keats, and Baudelaire, and is still widely used. A group of sonnets formally linked by repeated lines is known as a crown of sonnets. Lyrics may be composed in almost any metre and on almost every subject, although the most usual emotions presented are those of love and grief. Among the common lyric forms are the sonnet, ode, elegy, haiku, and the more personal kinds of hymn.
Lyricism is the emotional or song-like quality, the lyrical property, of lyric poetry.
A writer of lyric poems may be called a lyric poet, a lyricist, or a lyrist. In classical Greek and Latin poetry, the second line of the elegiac distich, commonly but inaccurately referred to as a 'pentameter' is in fact composed of two half-lines of two and a half feet each, with dactyls or spondees in the first half and dactyls in the second. The pattern in which the rhymed line-endings are arranged in a poem or stanza. Rhyme schemes may follow a fixed pattern, as in the sonnet and several other forms, or they may be arranged freely according to the poet's requirements. From The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms .