Sonnet

The sonnet was created by Giacomo da Lentini, head of the Sicilian School under Emperor Frederick II.[1] Guittone d'Arezzo rediscovered it and brought it to Tuscany where he adapted it to his language when he founded the Siculo-Tuscan School, or Guittonian school of poetry (1235–1294). He wrote almost 250 sonnets.[2] Other Italian poets of the time, including Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) and Guido Cavalcanti (c. 1250–1300), wrote sonnets, but the most famous early sonneteer was Petrarch. Other fine examples were written by Michelangelo.

The structure of a typical Italian sonnet of the time included two parts that together formed a compact form of "argument". First, the octave forms the "proposition", which describes a "problem" or "question", followed by a sestet (two tercets) which proposes a "resolution". Typically, the ninth line initiates what is called the "turn", or "volta", which signals the move from proposition to resolution. Even in sonnets that don't strictly follow the problem/resolution structure, the ninth line still often marks a "turn" by signaling a change in the tone, mood, or stance of the poem.

Later, the ABBA ABBA pattern became the standard for Italian sonnets. For the sestet there were two different possibilities: CDE CDE and CDC CDC. In time, other variants on this rhyming scheme were introduced, such as CDCDCD. Petrarch typically used an ABBA ABBA pattern for the octave, followed by either CDE CDE or CDC CDC rhymes in the sestet. The Crybin variant of the Italian sonnet has the rhyme scheme ABBA CDDC EFG EFG.

In American poetry, the first notable poet to use the sonnet form was Edgar Allan Poe.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow also wrote and translated many sonnets, among others the cycle Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy).[3] He used the Italian rhyme scheme.

Emma Lazarus, a Sephardic Jewish poet from New York City, also published many sonnets. She is the author of perhaps the best-known American sonnet, "The New Colossus," [4] which celebrates the Statue of Liberty and her role in welcoming immigrants to the New World.

Among the major poets of the early Modernist period, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay and E. E. Cummings all used the sonnet regularly.

In 1928, American poet and painter John Allan Wyeth published This Man's Army: A War in Fifty-Odd Sonnets. The collection, with a rhyme scheme unique in the history of the sonnet, traces Wyeth's military service with the American Expeditionary Force in France during World War I. According to Dana Gioia, who rescued Wyeth's work from oblivion during the early 21st century, Wyeth is the only American poet of the Great War who deserves to be compared with British war poets Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen.

During the Harlem Renaissance, African American writers of sonnets included Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Sterling A. Brown.[5]

Other modern poets, including Don Paterson, Edwin Morgan, Joan Brossa, Paul Muldoon have used the form. Wendy Cope's poem "Stress" is a sonnet. Elizabeth Bishop's inverted "Sonnet" was one of her last poems. Ted Berrigan's book, The Sonnets, "is conventional almost exclusively in [the] line count".[6] Paul Muldoon often experiments with 14 lines and sonnet rhymes, though without regular sonnet meter.

At the height of the Vietnam War in 1967, American poet Richard Wilbur composed A Miltonic Sonnet for Mr. Johnson on His Refusal of Peter Hurd's Official Portrait. In a clear cut case of "criticism from the Right", Wilbur compares U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson with Thomas Jefferson and finds the former to be greatly wanting. Commenting that Jefferson "would have wept to see small nations dread/ The imposition of our cattle brand," and that in Jefferson's term, "no army's blood was shed", Wilbur urges President Johnson to seriously consider how history will judge him and his Administration.

Beginning in the 1970s and '80s, the New Formalist Revival has also created a revival of the sonnet form in American poetry. Between 1994 and 2017, first The Formalist and then Measure sponsored the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, which was annually offered for the best new sonnet.

Rhina Espaillat, a Dominican immigrant and prominent New Formalist poet, has translated many Spanish and Latin American sonnets into English. No volume of her many translations, however, has yet been published. Espaillat has also used the sonnet form for original poetry, as well.

This revival includes the invention of the "word sonnet", which is a fourteen-line poem, with one word per line.[7] Frequently allusive and imagistic, word sonnets can also be irreverent and playful.

In Canada during the last decades of the 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 the form.[8]

American-born Canadian poet Catherine Chandler, who lives in Quebec, has published many sonnets.

Karel Hynek Mácha

The sonnet was introduced into Czech literature at the beginning of the 19th century. The first great Czech sonneteer was Ján Kollár, who wrote a cycle of sonnets named Slávy Dcera (The daughter of Sláva / The daughter of fame[9]). Kollár was Slovak and a supporter of Pan-Slavism, but wrote in Czech, as he disagreed that Slovak should be a separate language. Kollár's magnum opus was planned as a Slavic epic poem as great as Dante's Divine Comedy. It consists of The Prelude written in quantitative hexameters, and sonnets. The number of poems increased in subsequent editions and came up to 645.[10] The greatest Czech romantic poet, Karel Hynek Mácha also wrote many sonnets. In the second half of the 19th century Jaroslav Vrchlický published Sonety samotáře (Sonnets of a Solitudinarian). Another poet, who wrote many sonnets was Josef Svatopluk Machar. He published Čtyři knihy sonetů (The Four Books of Sonnets). In the 20th century Vítězslav Nezval wrote the cycle 100 sonetů zachránkyni věčného studenta Roberta Davida (One Hundred Sonnets for the Woman who Rescued Perpetual Student Robert David). After the Second World War the sonnet was the favourite form of Oldřich Vyhlídal. Czech poets use different metres for sonnets, Kollár and Mácha used decasyllables, Vrchlický iambic pentameter, Antonín Sova free verse, and Jiří Orten the Czech alexandrine. Ondřej Hanus wrote a monograph about Czech Sonnets in the first half of the twentieth century.[11]

In the Netherlands Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft wrote sonnets. A famous example is Mijn lief, mijn lief, mijn lief. Some of his poems were translated by Edmund Gosse.[12]

More recent sonneteers in Dutch are Gerrit Komrij, Martinus Nijhoff, and Jan Kal.

In French poetry, sonnets are traditionally composed in the French alexandrine line, which consists of twelve syllables with a caesura in the middle.

In the 16th century, around Ronsard (1524–1585), Joachim du Bellay (1522–1560) and Jean Antoine de Baïf (1532–1589), there formed a group of radical young noble poets of the court (generally known today as La Pléiade, although use of this term is debated), who began writing in, amongst other forms of poetry, the Petrarchan sonnet cycle (developed around an amorous encounter or an idealized woman). The character of La Pléiade literary program was given in Du Bellay's manifesto, the "Defense and Illustration of the French Language" (1549), which maintained that French (like the Tuscan of Petrarch and Dante) was a worthy language for literary expression and which promulgated a program of linguistic and literary production (including the imitation of Latin and Greek genres) and purification.

In the aftermath of the Wars of Religion, French Catholic jurist and poet Jean de La Ceppède published the Theorems, a sequence of more than 500 Alexandrine sonnets, with non-traditional rhyme schemes, about the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Drawing upon the Gospels, Greek and Roman Mythology, and the Fathers of the Church, La Ceppède was praised by Saint Francis de Sales for transforming "the Pagan Muses into Christian ones." La Ceppède's sonnets often attack the Calvinist doctrine of a judgmental and unforgiving God by focusing on Christ's passionate love for the human race. Long forgotten, the 20th century witnessed a revival of interest in La Ceppède and his sonnets are now regarded as classic works of French poetry.

By the late 17th century poets on increasingly relied on stanza forms incorporating rhymed couplets, and by the 18th century fixed-form poems – and, in particular, the sonnet – were largely avoided. The resulting versification – less constrained by meter and rhyme patterns than Renaissance poetry – more closely mirrored prose.[18]

The Romantics were responsible for a return to (and sometimes a modification of) many of the fixed-form poems used during the 15th and 16th centuries, as well as for the creation of new forms. The sonnet however was little used until the Parnassians brought it back into favor,[19] and the sonnet would subsequently find its most significant practitioner in Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867).

The traditional French sonnet form was however significantly modified by Baudelaire, who used 32 different forms of sonnet with non-traditional rhyme patterns to great effect in his Les Fleurs du mal.[20]

The French Symbolists, such as Paul Verlaine and Stephane Mallarmé, also revived the sonnet form.

Paul Verlaine's Alexandrine sonnet Langeur, in which he compares himself to, "The Empire at the end of its decadence", while drinking in a low dive, was embraced as a manifesto by the Decadent poets and by literary bohemia.

Paulus Melissus (1539–1602) was the first to introduce both the sonnet and terza rima into German poetry. In his lifetime he was recognized as an author fully versed in Latin love poetry.[27]

The sonnet became especially popular in Germany through the work of Georg Rudolf Weckherlin and reached prominence through the poetry of the German Romantics.[28]

Germany's national poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, also wrote many sonnets, using a rhyme scheme derived from Italian poetry. After his death, Goethe's followers created the German sonnet, which is rhymed . a. b. b. a. . . b. c. c. b. . . c. d. d. . . c. d. d.

Sonnets were also written by August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Paul von Heyse, and others who established a tradition that reached fruition in the Sonnets to Orpheus,[29] a cycle of 55 sonnets written in 1922 by the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926). It was first published the following year.[30]

Rilke, who is "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets",[31] wrote the cycle in a period of three weeks experiencing what he described as a "savage creative storm".[32] Inspired by the news of the death of Wera Ouckama Knoop (1900–1919), a playmate of Rilke's daughter Ruth, he dedicated them as a memorial, or Grab-Mal (literally "grave-marker"), to her memory.[33]

In 1920, German war poet Anton Schnack, whom Patrick Bridgwater has dubbed, "one of the two unambiguously great," German poets of World War I and, "the only German language poet whose work can be compared with that of Wilfred Owen," published the sonnet sequence, Tier rang gewaltig mit Tier ("Beast Strove Mightily with Beast").[34]

Also according to Bridgwater, "The poems in Tier gewaltig mit Tier, follow an apparently chronological course which suggests that Schnack served first in France and then in Italy. They trace the course of the war, as he experienced it, from departing for the front, through countless experiences to which few other German poets with the exception of Stramm have done justice in more than isolated poems, to retreat and the verge of defeat."[35]

The 60 sonnets that comprise Tier rang gewaltig mit Tier, "are dominated by themes of night and death."[36] Although his ABBACDDCEFGEFG rhyme scheme is typical of the sonnet form, Schnack also, "writes in the long line in free rhythms developed in Germany by Ernst Stadler."[37] Patrick Bridgwater, writing in 1985, called Tier rang gewaltig mit Tier, "without question the best single collection produced by a German war poet in 1914-18." Bridgwater adds, however, that Anton Schnack, "is to this day virtually unknown even in Germany."[38]

The German Jewish poet Herbert Eulenberg also wrote many sonnets.

In the Indian subcontinent, sonnets have been written in the Assamese, Bengali, Dogri, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Sindhi and Urdu languages.[39] Urdu poets, also influenced by English and other European poets, took to writing sonnets in the Urdu language rather late.[40] Azmatullah Khan (1887–1923) is believed to have introduced this format to Urdu literature in the very early part of the 20th century. The other renowned Urdu poets who wrote sonnets were Akhtar Junagarhi, Akhtar Sheerani, Noon Meem Rashid, Mehr Lal Soni Zia Fatehabadi, Salaam Machhalishahari and Wazir Agha.[41] This example, a sonnet by Zia Fatehabadi taken from his collection Meri Tasveer,[42] is in the usual English (Shakespearean) sonnet rhyme-scheme.

"Dubkani"

Pas e pardaa kisii ne mere armaanon kii mehfil ko (A)

Kuchh is andaaz se dekhaa, kuchh aise taur se dekhaa (B)

Ghubaar e aah se de kar jilaa aainaa e dil ko (A)

Har ik soorat ko maine khoob dekhaa, ghaur se dekhaa (B)

Nazar aaii na woh soorat, mujhe jiskii tamanaa thii (C)

Bahut dhoondaa kiyaa gulshan mein, veeraane mein, bastii mein (D)

Munnawar shamma e mehar o maah se din raat duniyaa thii (C)

Magar chaaron taraf thaa ghup andheraa merii hastii mein (D)

Dil e majboor ko majrooh e ulfat kar diyaa kisne (E)

Mere ahsaas kii ghahraiion mein hai chubhan gham kii (F)

Mitaa kar jism, merii rooh ko apnaa liyaa kisne (E)

Jawanii ban gaii aamaajagaah sadmaat e paiham kii (F)

Hijaabaat e nazar kaa sisilaa tod aur aa bhii jaa (G)

Mujhe ik baar apnaa jalwaa e rangiin dikhaa bhii jaa. (G)

• See Irish poetry

Although sonnets had long been written in English by poets such as Edmund Spenser, William Butler Yeats, Tom Kettle, and Patrick Kavanagh, the sonnet form failed to enter poetry in the Irish language. This changed, however, during the Gaelic revival.

According to poet Louis De Paor, the sonnet was first introduced into Irish language poetry by Liam Gógan, who was imprisoned in Frongoch internment camp after the Easter Rising of 1916 and who joined the civil service after the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922. According to De Paor, Gógan believed that the everyday spoken Irish of the remaining Gaeltachts were, "a diminished form of the older language, attenuated by English colonisation and inadequate to express the full complexity of the modern world." In response, Gógan drew upon older writings in Irish to create a literary language and on his only knowledge of European literature and art as a source of inspiration. Although, De Paor praises Gógan's, "mastery of language," he calls the latter's literary idiom, "synthetic," and dubs Gógan's introduction of the sonnet form into Irish, "proof of artificiality and inauthenticity." De Paor concludes, however, "He was, nonetheless, the most impressive poet in Irish from Pearse's death until the emergence of a new generation of poets in the 1940s."[43]

In 2009, poet Muiris Sionóid published a complete translation of William Shakespeare's 154 sonnets into Irish under the title Rotha Mór an Ghrá ("The Great Wheel of Love").[44]

In an article about his translations, Sionóid wrote that Irish poetic forms are completely different from those of other languages and that both the sonnet form and the iambic pentameter line had long been considered "entirely unsuitable" for composing poetry in Irish. In his translations, Soinóid chose to closely reproduce Shakespeare's rhyme scheme and rhythms while rendering into Irish.[45]

In a copy that he gifted to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford Upon Avon, Sionóid wrote, "From Slaneyside to Avonside, from a land of bards to the greatest Bard of all; and long life and happiness to the guardians of the world’s most precious treasure."[44]

"Italian sonnet" by Witold Szwedkowski, example of haptic poetry

The sonnet was introduced into Polish literature in the 16th century by Jan Kochanowski,[46] Mikołaj Sęp-Szarzyński and Sebastian Grabowiecki.[47]

In 1826, Poland's national poet, Adam Mickiewicz, wrote a sonnet sequence known as the Crimean Sonnets, after the Tsar sentenced him to internal exile in the Crimean Peninsula. Mickiewicz's sonnet sequence focuses heavily on the culture and Islamic religion of the Crimean Tatars. The sequence was translated into English by Edna Worthley Underwood.[48]

Sonnets were also written by Adam Asnyk, Jan Kasprowicz and Leopold Staff. Polish poets usually shape their sonnets according to Italian or French practice. The Shakespearean sonnet is not commonly used. Kasprowicz used a Shelleyan rhyme scheme: ABA BCB CDC DED EE.[49] Polish sonnets are typically written in either hendecasyllables (5+6 syllables) or Polish alexandrines (7+6 syllables).

Alexander Pushkin's novel in verse Eugene Onegin consists almost entirely of 389 stanzas of iambic tetrameter with the unusual rhyme scheme "AbAbCCddEffEgg", where the uppercase letters represent feminine rhymes while the lowercase letters represent masculine rhymes. This form has come to be known as the "Onegin stanza" or the "Pushkin sonnet."[50]

Unlike other traditional forms, such as the Petrarchan sonnet or Shakespearean sonnet, the Onegin stanza does not divide into smaller stanzas of four lines or two in an obvious way. There are many different ways this sonnet can be divided.

In post-Pushkin Russian poetry, the form has been utilized by authors as diverse as Mikhail Lermontov, the Catholic convert poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, Jurgis Baltrušaitis and Valery Pereleshin, in genres ranging from one-stanza lyrical piece to voluminous autobiography. Nevertheless, the Onegin stanza, being easily recognisable, is strongly identified as belonging to Pushkin.

John Fuller's 1980 "The Illusionists" and Jon Stallworthy's 1987 "The Nutcracker" used this stanza form, and Vikram Seth's 1986 novel The Golden Gate is written wholly in Onegin stanzas.[51]

France Prešeren

In Slovenia the sonnet became a national verse form. The greatest Slovenian poet, France Prešeren,[52] wrote many sonnets. His best known work worldwide is Sonetni venec (A Wreath of Sonnets),[53] which is an example of crown of sonnets. Another work of his is the sequence Sonetje nesreče (Sonnets of Misfortune). In writing sonnets Prešeren was followed by many later poets. After the Second World War sonnets remained very popular. Slovenian poets write both traditional rhymed sonnets and modern ones, unrhymed, in free verse. Among them are Milan Jesih and Aleš Debeljak. The metre for sonnets in Slovenian poetry is iambic pentameter with feminine rhymes, based both on the Italian endecasillabo and German iambic pentameter.

According to Willis Barnstone, the introduction of the sonnet into Spanish language poetry began with a chance meeting in 1526 between the Catalan poet Juan Boscán and Andrea Navagero, the Venetian Ambassador to the Spanish Court. While the Ambassador was accompanying King Carlos V on a state visit to the Alhambra, he encountered Boscán along the banks of the Darro River in Granada. As they talked, Navagero strongly urged Boscán to introduce the sonnet and other Italian forms into Spanish poetry. A few days later, Boscán began trying to compose sonnets as he rode home and found the form, "of a very capable disposition to receive whatever material, whether grave or subtle or difficult or easy, and in itself good for joining with any style that we find among the approved ancient authors."[54]

Spaniard Federico García Lorca also wrote sonnets.

Associated forms

• Fourteener (poetry)
• Quatorzain

• I. Bell, et al. A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets. Blackwell Publishing, 2006. ISBN 1-4051-2155-6.
• Bertoni, Giulio (1915). I Trovatori d'Italia: Biografie, testi, tradizioni, note. Rome: Società Multigrafica Editrice Somu.
• T. W. H. Crosland. The English Sonnet. Hesperides Press, 2006. ISBN 1-4067-9691-3.
• J. Fuller. The Oxford Book of Sonnets. Oxford University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-19-280389-1.
• J. Fuller. The Sonnet. (The Critical Idiom: #26). Methuen & Co., 1972. ISBN 0-416-65690-0.
• U. Hennigfeld. Der ruinierte Körper: Petrarkistische Sonette in transkultureller Perspektive. Königshausen & Neumann, 2008. ISBN 978-3-8260-3768-9.
• J. Hollander. Sonnets: From Dante to the Present. Everyman's Library, 2001. ISBN 0-375-41177-1.
• P. Levin. The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English. Penguin, 2001. ISBN 0-14-058929-5.
• S. Mayne. Ricochet, Word Sonnets - Sonnets d'un mot. Translated by Sabine Huynh. University of Ottawa Press, 2011. ISBN 978-2-7603-0761-2
• J. Phelan. The Nineteenth Century Sonnet. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ISBN 1-4039-3804-0.
• S. Regan. The Sonnet. Oxford University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-19-289307-6.
• M. R. G. Spiller. The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction. Routledge, 1992. ISBN 0-415-08741-4.
• M. R. G. Spiller. The Sonnet Sequence: A Study of Its Strategies. Twayne Pub., 1997. ISBN 0-8057-0970-3.

• Sixty-Six: The Journal of Sonnet Studies
• BBC discussion on "The Sonnet". Radio 4 programme In our time. (Audio, 45 minutes)
• List of Sonnets at Poets.org