<P> The sonnet was introduced into Czech literature at the beginning of the 19th century . The first great Czech sonneteer was Ján Kollár, who wrote a cycle of sonnets named Slávy Dcera (The daughter of Sláva / The daughter of fame). Kollár was Slovak and a supporter of Pan-Slavism, but wrote in Czech, as he disagreed that Slovak should be a separate language . Kollár's magnum opus was planned as a Slavic epic poem as great as Dante's Divine Comedy . It consists of The Prelude written in quantitative hexameters, and sonnets . The number of poems increased in subsequent editions and came up to 645 . The greatest Czech romantic poet, Karel Hynek Mácha also wrote many sonnets . In the second half of the 19th century Jaroslav Vrchlický published Sonety samotáře (Sonnets of a Solitudinarian). Another poet, who wrote many sonnets was Josef Svatopluk Machar . He published Čtyři knihy sonetů (The Four Books of Sonnets). In the 20th century Vítězslav Nezval wrote the cycle 100 sonetů zachránkyni věčného studenta Roberta Davida (One Hundred Sonnets for the Woman who Rescued Perpetual Student Robert David). After the Second World War the sonnet was the favourite form of Oldřich Vyhlídal . Czech poets use different metres for sonnets, Kollár and Mácha used decasyllables, Vrchlický iambic pentameter, Antonín Sova free verse, and Jiří Orten the Czech alexandrine . Ondřej Hanus wrote a monograph about Czech Sonnets in the first half of the twentieth century . </P> <P> In Slovenia the sonnet became a national verse form . The greatest Slovenian poet, France Prešeren, wrote many sonnets . His best known work worldwide is Sonetni venec (A Wreath of Sonnets), which is an example of crown of sonnets . Another work of his is the sequence Sonetje nesreče (Sonnets of Misfortune). In writing sonnets Prešeren was followed by many later poets . After the Second World War sonnets remained very popular . Slovenian poets write both traditional rhymed sonnets and modern ones, unrhymed, in free verse . Among them are Milan Jesih and Aleš Debeljak . The metre for sonnets in Slovenian poetry is iambic pentameter with feminine rhymes, based both on the Italian endecasillabo and German iambic pentameter . </P>

Both english and italian sonnets have 14 lines