Currently he heads the Committee on Public Doublespeak of the National Council of Teachers of English. His poetry has appeared in many publications, including Bibliophilos , Insight , and Burning Cloud Review . The sonnet is like the legendary camel which, having put its nose into the tent to keep it warm, soon makes himself at home. Originally an Italian import, it has become the most popular, almost the standard form in English, with thousands of published examples produced by practically every major and minor poet since before Shakespeare. Everyone should write at least one sonnet in a lifetime.
Sonnets are fourteen-line poems, period.
They exist in every line length, with every rhyme scheme imaginable, or with no rhyme scheme at all. Of these, let's work with the more popular, more elaborate, and at least formally more difficult form. Hopeless lovers have imitated him ever since. The eight-line stanza, called an octave , uses two rhyme words. We could represent that using the scheme abcbac .