Sonnets books
Sonnets books to start from. Open one to see books like it, or tell BookSense what you loved for four picks made for you.
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New to the genre? These 5 are the books to read first.
Canzoniere
PetrarchA sequence of Italian sonnets about love for Laura; it set the pattern most later sonnet writers followed.
Astrophil and Stella
Sir Philip SidneyA sonnet sequence about an unattainable love, with sonnets that examine the poet's own motives.
Amoretti
Edmund SpenserA sequence in which Spenser adapts the sonnet to a courtship that ends in marriage, with an interlaced rhyme scheme.
Sonnets
William Shakespeare154 sonnets on love, time, beauty and betrayal, and the English form most readers now know.
Holy Sonnets
John DonneReligious sonnets with strained syntax and argument, printed posthumously in his collected poems.
Chosen and described with AI from our notes on the genre.
More sonnets books
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- Sonnets.
Sonnets.John Milton - Sonnets from the Portuguese
Sonnets from the PortugueseElizabeth Barrett Browning - Sonnets to Orpheus
Sonnets to OrpheusRainer Maria Rilke - Fatal Interview
Fatal InterviewEdna St. Vincent Millay - Field Work
Field WorkSeamus Heaney - American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
American Sonnets for My Past and Future AssassinTerrance Hayes - Poems of John Donne
Poems of John DonneJohn Donne1633 - The Elizabethan love sonnet
The Elizabethan love sonnetJ. W. Lever1956 - The Making of a Sonnet
The Making of a SonnetEdward Hirsch2008 - The American tradition in literature
The American tradition in literatureSculley Bradley1956 - Pagan sonnets
Pagan sonnetsJohn Myers O'Hara1913 - The Lichtenberg figures
The Lichtenberg figuresBen Lerner2004