The oft overlooked godfathers of the English Sonnet.
1503-1542
A drawn portrait of Thomas Wyatt by Hans Holbein.
1516-1547
A painted portrait of Henry Howard by an unknown artist.
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard were good friends.
The English sonnet came from the Italian sonnet, also known as the Petrarchen sonnet. They adapted Petrarch's sonnet by designating 14 lines of iambic pentameter. In the original Petrarchen sonnets, the rhyme sceme followed an ABBA ABBA CDE CDE scheme rather than a ABAB CDCD EFEF GG scheme. 4 and 5