<P> By the late 17th century poets on increasingly relied on stanza forms incorporating rhymed couplets, and by the 18th century fixed - form poems--and, in particular, the sonnet--were largely avoided . The resulting versification--less constrained by meter and rhyme patterns than Renaissance poetry--more closely mirrored prose . </P> <P> The Romantics were responsible for a return to (and sometimes a modification of) many of the fixed - form poems used during the 15th and 16th centuries, as well as for the creation of new forms . The sonnet however was little used until the Parnassians brought it back into favor, and the sonnet would subsequently find its most significant practitioner in Charles Baudelaire (1821--1867). The traditional French sonnet form was however significantly modified by Baudelaire, who used 32 different forms of sonnet with non-traditional rhyme patterns to great effect in his Les Fleurs du mal . </P> <P> When English sonnets were introduced by Thomas Wyatt (1503--1542) in the early 16th century, his sonnets and those of his contemporary the Earl of Surrey were chiefly translations from the Italian of Petrarch and the French of Ronsard and others . While Wyatt introduced the sonnet into English, it was Surrey who developed the rhyme scheme--abab cdcd efef gg--which now characterizes the English sonnet . Having previously circulated in manuscripts only, both poets' sonnets were first published in Richard Tottel's Songes and Sonnetts, better known as Tottel's Miscellany (1557). </P> <P> It was, however, Sir Philip Sidney's sequence Astrophel and Stella (1591) that started the English vogue for sonnet sequences . The next two decades saw sonnet sequences by William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, Fulke Greville, William Drummond of Hawthornden, and many others . These sonnets were all essentially inspired by the Petrarchan tradition, and generally treat of the poet's love for some woman, with the exception of Shakespeare's sequence of 154 sonnets . The form is often named after Shakespeare, not because he was the first to write in this form but because he became its most famous practitioner . The form consists of fourteen lines structured as three quatrains and a couplet . The third quatrain generally introduces an unexpected sharp thematic or imagistic "turn", the volta . In Shakespeare's sonnets, however, the volta usually comes in the couplet, and usually summarizes the theme of the poem or introduces a fresh new look at the theme . With only a rare exception, the meter is iambic pentameter . </P>

When was the sonnet introduced in england and by whom