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Message: <blockquote data-quote="shilsen" data-source="post: 2422502" data-attributes="member: 198"><p>Just to be nitpicky, while Barsoomcore gives a good functional definition of a sonnet, that's also a narrow definition (essentially applying to mid-16th to early-17th century English poetry) and hardly encapsulates sonnets as the form has existed and developed over the ages. You can have sonnets in iambic tetrameter or hexameter, with twelve lines or sixteen lines, and so on. The turn in the sonnet is even more specifically dated a concept, being very big for the Elizabethan writers taking on the sonnet from Italian (esp. Petrarch) and adapting it to their own purposes, but not always mattering in other periods. For the purposes of this competition, the fourteen line iambic pentameter version is probably a good baseline to go with, but it's definitely not the only form of sonnet possible and/or in existence.</p></blockquote><p></p>