The sonnet, as we have seen, is an immensely adaptable and versatile form. Not the least of its strengths is the opportunity it affords poets for striking a balance between conforming to certain norms and deviating from them. So powerful, however, is what could be termed the idea of the sonnet that whenever the form is used, however loosely, the classical notion is inescapably evoked, together with expectations of what kind of poem it will be. While a sonnet's subject-matter can be as wide-ranging as any kind of poetry it is especially associated with love poetry. Indeed it could be safely said that it is the vehicle par excellence of amatory verse down the ages.

Even though the connection of sonnet and love poetry is not confined to any particular period it was the sixteenth century that was its heyday. It has been calculated that over a quarter of a million sonnets were written in Europe during this century. However approximate that statistic may be, it should nonetheless serve as a formidable warning against reading poetry as autobiography. Writing about Renaissance literature, A. J. Krailsheimer observes that ‘originality in the sense of doing something new, and sincerity, in a simple autobiographical sense, are irrelevant concepts’. We have already seen in Chapter 1 the dangers inherent in such an approach with Garcilaso's poetry.