In Our Time Click to listen to the whole programme again. Thursday 21 June 9.00-9.45am repeated at 9.30pm Presented by Melvyn Bragg Shakespeare, Petrarch, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley and practically every poet since the Renaissance has at some point volunteered to be bound by the rigid strictures of the sonnet form. Huge claims have been made to explain the sonnet's popularity as a poetic form over the centuries. Some say it perfectly represents the human intellectual process on a single thought, others that the arrangement of rhyme and metre picks up a rhythm in nature like a harmonic in music.
Many people claim it is just a popular puzzle that poets use to show off.
Jonathan Bate, King Alfred Professor of English, University of Liverpool.