For the lowdown on the history and great practitioners of English language sonnets, click immediately to Sonnet Central.

In the meantime, please enjoy my own personal Top Thirteen culled from the Dead Poets Society.

Whoso List to Hunt by Thomas Wyatt

Sonnet 129 by William Shakespeare

Batter My Heart by John Donne

Thou Hast Made Me by John Donne

Prayer by George Herbert

On His Blindness by John Milton

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer by John Keats

Carrion Comfort by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Once by the Pacific by Robert Frost

What Lips... by Edna St. Vincent Millay

For My Daughter by Weldon Kees

Angel of Flight and Sleigh Bells by Anne Sexton

The Interlude by Karl Shapiro