From Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor

This week’s chapter is a short one, which is fitting because it’s about sonnets-the only type of poetry most readers will really need to know about, according to Foster. Only two notes on this one:

-24- Sonnets – fourteen lines long and roughly ten syllables wide = square.

-25 Type 1: Petrarchan: Two parts to a sonnet—a section of eight lines and a section of six lines; each section has its own rhyme scheme though the themes are related.

Type 2: Shakespearean: first four rhyme, next four rhyme, third four rhyme, last two rhyme.