Award. Canada In Canada during the last decades of the 19th century, the Confederation Poets and especially Archibald Lampman were known for their sonnets, which were mainly on pastoral themes. Canadian poet Seymour Mayne has published a few collections of word sonnets, and is one of the chief innovators of a form using a single word per line to capture its honed perception. In German Paulus Melissus was the first to introduce the sonnet into German poetry. But the man who did most to raise the sonnet to German consciousness was Martin Opitz, who in two works, Buch von der deutschen Poeterey (1624) and Acht Bücher Deutscher Poematum (1625), established the sonnet as a separate genre and its rules of composition. It was to be written in iambic alexandrines, with alternating masculine and feminine enclosed rhymes in the octave and a more flexible sestet with three rhymes. Reinforcing them were translated examples from Petrarch, Ronsard and Daniel Heinsius. Thereafter in the 18th century, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote several love sonnets, using a rhyme scheme derived from Italian poetry. After his death, Goethe's followers created the freer 'German sonnet', which is rhymed ABBA BCCB CDD CDD. The sonnet tradition was then continued by August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Paul von Heyse and others, reaching fruition in Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, which has been described as "one of the great modern poems, not to mention a monumental addition to the literature of the sonnet sequence". A cycle of 55 sonnets, it was written in two parts in 1922 while Rilke was in the midst of completing his Duino Elegies. The full title in German is Die Sonette an Orpheus: Geschrieben als ein Grab-Mal für Wera Ouckama Knoop (translated as Sonnets to Orpheus: Written as a Monument for Wera Ouckama Knoop), commemorating the recent death of a young dancer from leukaemia. The (literally "grave-marker") of the title brings to mind the series of Tombeaux written by Stéphane Mallarmé, translated (among others) by Rilke in 1919, also coinciding with the sonnets of Michelangelo which Rilke had been translating in 1921. Rilke's own sonnets are fluidly structured as a transposition of the dead girl's dancing and encompass themes of life and death and art's relation to them. As well as having varied rhyme schemes, line lengths also vary and are irregularly metred, even within the same sonnet at times. Responses to turbulent times