The body of work known as Milton's sonnets comprises twenty-five poems: twenty-three fourteen-line sonnets (five in Italian, eighteen in English); one fifteen-line canzone in Italian; and one English 'tailed' sonnet (the twentyline 'On the New Forcers of Conscience'). The first ten sonnets, including the five Italian ones plus the canzone, were published in Milton's Poems of 1645. These and the rest, save for those addressed to Fairfax, Cromwell, Vane, and the second one to Cyriack Skinner - apparently omitted for political reasons but included in the Trinity Manuscript - appeared in the Poems of 1673. Setting aside debates concerning the sonnets' dating and sequence, we shall focus here on some eleven of Milton's English sonnets, and on specific individuals or groups addressed or mentioned in them.

The public, topical, even heroic sonnet; the sonnet praising or counselling a friend, threatening or mocking an enemy; the sonnet marking a point or problem in the poet's own career - all these were recognized and accepted variations of the genre in sixteenth-century Italy, but were most unusual in mid-seventeenth-century England when Milton turned to them in conscious imitation of such models as the Italian poets Delia Casa and Tasso. For English readers, the sonnet was concerned with human love and sometimes, as in Donne and Herbert and one or two memorable occasions in Spenser, with divine love.