What was the appeal of "the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground" to Romantic and Victorian poets? How did a form which had fallen into disuse in the early eighteenth century become a central and enduring part of nineteenth-century poetry? This study traces the history and development of the sonnet throughout the nineteenth century, examining the work of Wordsworth, Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, George Meredith, and a number of other key canonical and non-canonical writers.