This course will trace the history and persistence of the sonnet in English poetry, but it will start with the founder of the tradition, the early Renaissance Italian poet, Francesco Petrarch, who made the form popular, and remained its model practitioner. Since the form flourished in the Renaissance (in England as in all over Europe) and was revived in the 19th century, the course will mainly be devoted to poets from those periods. Poets to be studied will include: Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Hopkins, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and D. G. Rossetti. There will be a midterm and a final paper. (Poetry) Graduate students in the course would attend and participate, but will write a longer, more ambitious final paper.