Stephen Regan, The Sonnet.

The first three chapters provide a roughly chronological overview of the Renaissance, Romantic, and Victorian sonnet while the last three all focus primarily on the twentieth century but branch out geographically to cover, in turn, the Irish, American, and British sonnet (this last in a chapter somewhat misleadingly called "the modern sonnet"). Stephen Regan's I The Sonnet i is a wide-ranging overview of the sonnet in English, from its origins in Wyatt and Surrey's translations of Petrarch all the way up to the work of contemporary sonneteers including Leontia Flynn, Shane McCrae, and Eleanor Brown. Chapters One to Three cover the first four centuries of the sonnet's development in detail and depth, with many perceptive readings as well as useful overviews of the most important sonnets and sonneteers from each period. [Extracted from the article]