Answer:
I would say that the best answer to the question: The genius of Shakespeare´s sonnets is that they:___, would be: Merge form and content into a unified whole.
Explanation:
In English poetry, there have been, since its initiation, two styles that have heavily influenced it: the Petrarchan sonnet and the Shakespearean sonnet. In the case of Shakespeare he became highly influential not only because he took a different route to what had, up until his time, been the norm in lyric poetry, especially of the romantic kind, but he actually innovated on it, and even changed it. What Shakesperare did was to create his poems using his own style of meter and rhyme to meet his objectives, going over the styles that had been used by other poets of his time, and of previous times. But he also took content, mostly romantic in essence, and tweaked it, so that, where once poets created sonnets about love and beauty as positive and desirable situations, Shakespeare might not always portray such emotions in that way. But most importantly, what Shakespeare did was to merge form (meter and rhyme) and unified it with the complex thoughts of his time, to produce a unified whole.
