Sonnet
A sonnet is a structured poem consisting of fourteen lines, traditionally adhering to specific rhyming schemes. The term "sonnet" comes from the Italian word "sonetto," which translates to "little sound" or "little song." This poetic form originated in Italy around the 13th century and was notably refined by Francesco Petrarca, known as Petrarch, who established the Italian sonnet structure with an octave and a sestet. In contrast, the English or Shakespearean sonnet, named after William Shakespeare, features three quatrains followed by a rhyming couplet. Over the centuries, the sonnet has been embraced by numerous poets across cultures, with each adding their distinct interpretations and innovations.
Though its popularity waned during the 17th century, the sonnet experienced a revival during the Romantic period, with notable contributions from poets like William Wordsworth and John Keats. In contemporary poetry, the sonnet continues to be explored and adapted by diverse voices, including those from the Harlem Renaissance and modern movements like New Formalism. This enduring form remains relevant, reflecting a wide array of human experiences, emotions, and social themes, suggesting that its future in the realm of poetry is bright.
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Sonnet
The sonnet is a fourteen-line, traditionally rhyming poem. The word “sonnet” is derived from the Italian sonetto, meaning “a little sound” or “a little song.” Originating in Italy around 1235, the form was perfected by Francesco Petrarca (1304–74), known simply as Petrarch. The Petrarchan, or Italian, sonnet consists of an octave (eight lines), rhyming abbaabba, and a sestet (six lines), rhyming cdecde, cdeced, or cdcdee. The volta, or turn, is the shift between the octave, which sets up a dilemma, and the sestet, which offers a solution.
The English sonnet is also referred to as the Shakespearean sonnet, named after sixteenth-century poet and playwright William Shakespeare. It consists of three quatrains (four lines), rhyming abab cdcdefef, and a concluding rhyming couplet of two lines. The sonnet proved to be an enduring poetic form in English, and much of Anglo-American literary history can be traced through poets who have practiced the form.
Brief History
Likely invented by thirteenth-century Italian poet Giacomo da Lentini, the sonnet was a favorite form with the Italian lyric poets of the Middle Ages, but it was in Petrarch’s Canzoniere, a sequence of 366 poems, including 317 sonnets, that the form reached its finest achievement. Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–42) was introduced to the poetry of Petrarch during his travels in Italy as an emissary of England’s King Henry VIII. Upon his return, he introduced the sonnet through translations and by writing original poems in the form. Henry Howard, earl of Surrey (1517–47), is recognized jointly with Wyatt as the father of the English sonnet. It was Surrey who established the rhyme scheme that Shakespeare and others would later use.
The sixteenth-century poets who followed Wyatt and Surrey as sonneteers often followed Petrarch’s practice of writing a group of sonnets that were part of a sequence addressed to some idealized lady. Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) was the first English poet to write a sonnet sequence. His Astrophil and Stella established the use of the Petrarchan conventions: the woeful lover bewailing the indifference of his beloved, the trueness of his love for her, and the anguish her coldness causes him. Other sonnet sequences of the period include Samuel Daniel’s Delia (1592), Michael Drayton’s Idea’s Mirrour (1594), and Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti (1591). Spenser’s sequence uses a form known as the Spenserian sonnet with a rhyme scheme closer to the interlocking rhymes of the Petrarchan sonnet. However, the most famous and perhaps the finest sixteenth-century sonnets were a collection rather than a sequence. William Shakespeare’s sonnets , a 154-poem sequence, are addressed to a young man and a “dark lady” but deal with art, time, fame, and mortality as well as love.
The popularity of the sonnet diminished during the seventeenth century, perhaps due to excesses in the use of Petrarchan conventions, but poets of this period broke new ground with the form. Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621) by Lady Mary Wroth, niece of Sir Philip Sidney, was one of the first sequences by a woman. John Donne’s Holy Sonnets (1633) were personal and passionate, but the focus was on divine love. Later in the century, John Milton wrote twenty-three sonnets that broadened the subject matter to include political and personal subjects. He also extended the form into a twenty-line “tailed sonnet.”
After Milton, the sonnet ceased to be a significant poetic form until the sonnet revival of the Romantic period produced some of the most highly acclaimed sonnets in English literature. All of the major Romantic poets wrote sonnets. William Wordsworth was the most prolific, writing over five hundred sonnets. “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” is arguably his most well-known. John Keats wrote more than fifty sonnets. “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816) and “Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art” (1819) are among his most acclaimed. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” is a series of five terza rima sonnets. Terza rima is a poetic form with a rhyme scheme of aba bcb cdc, and so on, with the second line of each tercet signifying the rhyme of the first line of the next tercet and the final tercet standing alone.
Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire produced sonnet sequences in France. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the first American writers to use the form widely. In England, dozens of poets were writing sonnets into the final decade of the century, including an increasing number of women. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet sequence, Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), reversed the Petrarchan tradition by presenting a woman as the lover and a man as the object of her desire. Other sonnet sequences of merit include George Meredith’s Modern Love (1862), Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s House of Life (1870, 1881), and Christina Rossetti’s Monna Innominata (1881). Although the sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins were not published until 1918, he wrote them during the late nineteenth century, experimenting with a curtal, or contracted, sonnet of eleven lines in “Pied Beauty” (1877) and crafting the six desolate yet powerful sonnets discovered after his death that are often grouped together and referred to as the “terrible sonnets.”
The Sonnet Today
Poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries continued to explore innovations in the sonnet form. American twentieth-century poet Robert Frost stayed true to the basic form but experimented with rhyme, meter, and syntax. Frost’s “The Silken Tent,” a Shakespearean-styled sonnet, is a single comparison and a single sentence. Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) used a traditional form for subversive subject matter in sonnets that revealed female desire. African American poets of the Harlem Renaissance such as Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Brooks used the sonnet form to write about racism, poverty, and war. John Berryman wrote over one hundred Petrarchan sonnets about the history of an adulterous affair. British poet Tony Harrison (b. 1937) focused on class conflict in a series of sonnets. Mark Jarman (b. 1952) questioned and affirmed religious belief in his “Unholy Sonnets.”
In “Reflections on Vers Libre” (1917), T. S. Eliot cast doubt on the survival of the sonnet, yet nearly a century later, the sonnet continues to flourish. The New Formalism movement of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century has brought a resurgence of interest in returning to the strict rhyme and meter of the traditional sonnet form. The sonnet has a rich past, and all indications are that it has a promising future.
Bibliography
Brunner, Edward. “Inventing an Ancestor: The Scholar-Poet and the Sonnet.” New Formalisms and Literary Theory. Ed. Verena Theile and Linda Tredennick. New York: Macmillan, 2013. 71–95. Print.
Burt, Stephen, and David Mikics. The Art of the Sonnet. Cambridge: Belknap, 2010. Print.
Feldman, Paula R., and Daniel Robinson, eds. A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival. 1999. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. Print.
Foy, John. “Reviving the Sonnet.” Rev. of All of You on the Good Earth, by Ernest Hilbert. New Criterion. New Criterion, Apr. 2014. Web. 27 Oct. 2014.
Hirsch, Edward. A Poet’s Glossary. New York: Houghton, 2014. Print.
Van Remoortel, Marianne. Lives of the Sonnet, 1787–1895: Genre, Gender and Criticism. Burlington: Ashgate, 2011. Print.
Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge: Belknap, 1999. Print.
Wagner, Jennifer Ann. A Moment’s Monument: Revisionary Poetics and the Nineteenth-Century English Sonnet. Cranberry: Associated UPs, 1996. Print.