News at Eleven: The low point, it is clear,

came in the 18th, when poets like Dryden and Pope preferred expansive verse essays and satires to closed forms. William Cowper and other poets attempted to keep the fires burning--Cowper's tribute to William Wilberforce proclaims the emancipationist "Friend of the poor, the wrong'd, the fetter-gall'd"--but the sonnet was a diminished thing until the 19th century, when the British Romantic poets and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow--not to mention lesser-known sonneteers, such as Jones Very and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman--revived the form.

from The Wall Street Journal: How It Gives Life to Thee

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