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Need to know how to write a sonnet? Need to teach someone how to write a sonnet? Try our helpful illustrated guide.
Browse more poetry infographics
Browse the Shakespeare sonnets library (all 154!)
Browse the Top 10 Best Shakespeare Sonnets
Graphic elements by Billy Alexander, standard license, via Stock.xchng. Infographic by Will Willingham.
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Director of Many Things; Senior Editor, Designer and Illustrator at Tweetspeak Poetry
I used to be a claims adjuster, helping people and insurance companies make sense of loss. Now, I train other folks with ladders and tape measures to go and do likewise. Sometimes, when I’m not scaling small buildings or crunching numbers with my bare hands, I read Keats upside down. My first novel is Adjustments.
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Diana Trautwein says
Love this. A lot. And that is one weird sonnet (not that I would really know what that means…).
Will Willingham says
Me neither, Diana. That’s why I get picked for these things, you know? 😉
Ann Kroeker says
Funny. I would use this in the writing class I teach, but I think my ultra-conservative parents might gasp.
Ann Kroeker says
To be clear, since I may not have been in the previous comment, I don’t teach the parents…I teach their kids. But if word got back that the s word was in their poetry lesson for writing class, well, that just wouldn’t be good.
L. L. Barkat says
Ha 🙂
I already showed it to my kids. With good effect 😉
L. L. Barkat says
So, like… which ‘s’ word, Ann? 😉
Will Willingham says
I get that. I do.
It just kind of happened. 😉
L. L. Barkat says
A wreck in your hands, Will, is a rose by any other name.
Or something like that 😉
Hey, Sara thought it was pretty funny that you used Shakespeare’s words, even as you told others not to do so. I laughed (again), as I hadn’t caught that. I mean, I had. But not quite the way she saw it.
Peter Spenser says
There is a mistake in your explanation of iambic pentameter: it should be “each iamb,” not “each pair of iambs.” An iamb is a metrical “foot” of two syllables. The stress is on the second syllable of each individual iamb, not on the second syllable of each pair of them, which would contain four syllables.
Will Willingham says
Oh, geez. I really appreciate you pointing that out. Correction is on the way…
Donna says
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!! I still don’t know what most of this poetese means, but it feels so much less tragic now!!! 🙂 Thank you LW!!!
Megan Willome says
I have never understood sonnets. This helps. Perhaps it’s the profanity. (Geez!) And I’m ashamed to admit that I only knew the Shakespeare and the Dickinson sonnets you highlighted.
Will Willingham says
No shame, Megan.
The infographic required research at … every level. 🙂
Claire says
I do think a genius lurks inside your mind LW ; )
Charity Singleton says
This was absolutely hysterical.
I want to see the infographic for sestinas – now THAT would require some profanity.
L.L. Barkat says
That might have already happened, Charity, when the Managing Editor suggested a possible sestina Infographic someday 😉
Or not.
Maybe the Managing Editor just imagined it, which is highly probable.