The history of sonnets and its origins derive from Italy, with Italian Renaissance writer, poet and scholar, Francesco Petrarca, known in the English poetry world as Petrarch. He was the first poet to use sonnets and their objective was romantic in nature, as most of them were really love poems written in rhyme and in Italian. Petrarch, as one style of sonnets was later known, consists of 14 lines and iambic pentameter. Then, in the 16th century, another writer and poet made the use of sonnets famous in the English world; William Shakespeare, who also used the iambic pentameter form but unlike his Italian predecessor, wrote his poems in English. In poetry, then, the two most common types of sonnets used, by force of their being the origins, are the Petrarchan (named so after Petrarch) sonnets and the Shakespearean sonnets. Both have common qualities, like the fact that both have a beginning set of lines where the problem of the poem is exposed and explained, and the second half, or turn, where the resolution of the poem´s question is resolved. One difference, among many, however, is that in Shakespearean sonnets, there are two last lines, at the end, known as the heroic couplet, and Petrarchan sonnets do not have this.
