This classic study of the Elizabethan sonnet, first published in 1956 and as a second edition in 1965, describes the development of the English sonnet from the early poems of Wyatt and Surrey, which were strongly influenced by Petrarch, to the great original sonnets of Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare. The book's underlying theme is the literary tradition which inspired the greatest Elizabethan sonnets. The tradition reaches back to a European, especially an Italian past, but it was adapted and transformed by distinctively English attitudes, the resulting tension supplying the main dynamic of development.
