poetic form
Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in a ...
that originated in the poetry composed at the Court of the Holy Roman EmperorFrederick II in the Sicilian city of Palermo. The 13th-century poet and
notary
A notary is a person authorised to perform acts in legal affairs, in particular witnessing signatures on documents. The form that the notarial profession takes varies with local legal systems.
A notary, while a legal professional, is disti ...
Giacomo da Lentini
Giacomo da Lentini, also known as Jacopo da Lentini or with the appellative Il Notaro, was an Italian poet of the 13th century. He was a senior poet of the Sicilian School and was a notary at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Gi ...
is credited with the sonnet's invention, and the
Sicilian School
The Sicilian School was a small community of Sicilian and mainland Italian poets gathered around Frederick II, most of them belonging to his imperial court. Headed by Giacomo da Lentini, they produced more than 300 poems of courtly love betwe ...
of poets who surrounded him then spread the form to the mainland. The earliest sonnets, however, no longer survive in the original
Sicilian language
Sicilian ( scn, sicilianu, link=no, ; it, siciliano) is a Romance language that is spoken on the island of Sicily and its satellite islands. A variant, ''Calabro-Sicilian'', is spoken in southern Calabria, where it is called Southern Calabro ...
, but only after being translated into
Tuscan dialect
Tuscan ( it, dialetto toscano ; it, vernacolo, label=locally) is a set of Italo-Dalmatian varieties of Romance mainly spoken in Tuscany, Italy.
Standard Italian is based on Tuscan, specifically on its Florentine dialect, and it became the ...
.
The term "sonnet" is derived from the Italian word ''sonetto'' (lit. "little song", derived from the Latin word ''sonus'', meaning a sound). By the 13th century it signified a poem of fourteen lines that followed a strict
rhyme scheme
A rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhymes at the end of each line of a poem or song. It is usually referred to by using letters to indicate which lines rhyme; lines designated with the same letter all rhyme with each other.
An example of the ABAB r ...
and structure.
According to Christopher Blum, during the
Renaissance
The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history
The history of Europe is traditionally divided into four time periods: prehistoric Europe (prior to about 800 BC), classical antiquity (800 BC to AD ...
, the sonnet became the "choice mode of expressing romantic love". During that period, too, the form was taken up in many other European language areas and eventually any subject was considered acceptable for writers of sonnets. Impatience with the set form resulted in many variations over the centuries, including abandonment of the quatorzain limit and even of rhyme altogether in modern times.
Romance languages
Italian
The sonnet is believed to have been created by
Giacomo da Lentini
Giacomo da Lentini, also known as Jacopo da Lentini or with the appellative Il Notaro, was an Italian poet of the 13th century. He was a senior poet of the Sicilian School and was a notary at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Gi ...
, leader of the
Sicilian School
The Sicilian School was a small community of Sicilian and mainland Italian poets gathered around Frederick II, most of them belonging to his imperial court. Headed by Giacomo da Lentini, they produced more than 300 poems of courtly love betwe ...
Peter Dronke
Ernst Peter Michael Dronke FBA (30 May 1934 – 19 April 2020) was a scholar specialising in Medieval Latin literature. He was one of the 20th century's leading scholars of medieval Latin lyric, and his book ''The Medieval Lyric'' (1968) is consi ...
has commented that there was something intrinsic to its flexible form that contributed to its survival far beyond its region of origin. The form consisted of a pair of quatrains followed by a pair of
tercet
A tercet is composed of three lines of poetry, forming a stanza or a complete poem.
Examples of tercet forms
English-language haiku is an example of an unrhymed tercet poem. A poetic triplet is a tercet in which all three lines follow the same ...
s with the symmetrical rhyme scheme ABABABAB CDCDCD, where the sense is carried forward in a new direction after the midway break. William Baer suggests that the first eight lines of the earliest Sicilian sonnets are identical to the eight-line Sicilian folksong stanza known as the ''Strambotto''. To this, da Lentini (or whoever else invented the form) added two tercets to the ''Strambotto'' in order to create the new 14-line sonnet form.
In contrast, Hassanally Ladha has argued that the Sicilian sonnet's structure and content drew upon Arabic poetry and cannot be explained as an "invention" by
Giacomo da Lentini
Giacomo da Lentini, also known as Jacopo da Lentini or with the appellative Il Notaro, was an Italian poet of the 13th century. He was a senior poet of the Sicilian School and was a notary at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Gi ...
or any other member of the Sicilian School. Ladha notes that "in its Sicilian beginnings, the sonnet evinces literary and epistemological contact with the ''
qasida
The qaṣīda (also spelled ''qaṣīdah''; is originally an Arabic word , plural ''qaṣā’id'', ; that was passed to some other languages such as fa, قصیده or , ''chakameh'', and tr, kaside) is an ancient Arabic word and form of writin ...
''", and emphasizes that the sonnet did not emerge simultaneously with its supposedly defining 14-line structure. "Tellingly, attempts to close off the sonnet from its Arabic predecessors depend upon a definition of the new lyric to which Giacomo's poetry does not conform: surviving in thirteenth-century recensions, his poems appear not in fourteen, but rather six lines, including four rows, each with two
hemistich
A hemistich (; via Latin from Ancient Greek, Greek , from "half" and "verse") is a half-line of verse, followed and preceded by a caesura, that makes up a single overall prosodic or verse unit. In Latin verse, Latin and Greek poetry, the hemist ...
es and two "tercets" each in a line extending over two rows." In Ladha's view, the sonnet emerges as the continuation of a broader tradition of love poetry throughout the Mediterranean world and relates to such other forms as the Sicilian ''strambotto'', the Provençal '' canso'', the
Andalusi Arabic
Andalusi Arabic (), also known as Andalusian Arabic, was a variety or varieties of Arabic spoken mainly from the 9th to the 17th century in Al-Andalus, the regions of the Iberian Peninsula (modern Spain and Portugal) once under Muslim rule. It b ...
''
muwashshah
''Muwashshah'' ( ar, موشح ' literally means " girdled" in Classical Arabic; plural ' or ' ) is the name for both an Arabic poetic form and a secular musical genre. The poetic form consists of a multi-lined strophic verse poem writt ...
'' and ''
zajal
Zajal () is a traditional form of oral strophic poetry declaimed in a colloquial dialect. While there is little evidence of the exact origins of the zajal, the earliest recorded zajal poet was the poet Ibn Quzman of al-Andalus who lived from 1078 ...
'', as well as the ''qasida''.
Guittone d'Arezzo
Guittone d'Arezzo (Arezzo, 1235 – 1294) was a Tuscan poet and the founder of the Tuscan School. He was an acclaimed secular love poet before his conversion in the 1260s, when he became a religious poet joining the Order of the Blessed Virgi ...
Tuscan dialect
Tuscan ( it, dialetto toscano ; it, vernacolo, label=locally) is a set of Italo-Dalmatian varieties of Romance mainly spoken in Tuscany, Italy.
Standard Italian is based on Tuscan, specifically on its Florentine dialect, and it became the ...
when he founded the Siculo-Tuscan, or Guittonian school of poetry (1235–1294). He wrote almost 250 sonnets. Among the host of other Italian poets that followed, the sonnets of
Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri (; – 14 September 1321), probably baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri and often referred to as Dante (, ), was an Italian poet, writer and philosopher. His ''Divine Comedy'', originally called (modern Italian: '' ...
and Guido Cavalcanti stand out, but later the most famous and widely influential was
Petrarch
Francesco Petrarca (; 20 July 1304 – 18/19 July 1374), commonly anglicized as Petrarch (), was a scholar and poet of early Renaissance Italy, and one of the earliest humanists.
Petrarch's rediscovery of Cicero's letters is often credited ...
.
The structure of a typical Italian sonnet as it developed 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 A sestet is six lines of poetry forming a stanza or complete poem. A sestet is also the name given to the second division of an Italian sonnet (as opposed to an English or Spenserian Sonnet), which must consist of an octave, of eight lines, succeede ...
(two
tercet
A tercet is composed of three lines of poetry, forming a stanza or a complete poem.
Examples of tercet forms
English-language haiku is an example of an unrhymed tercet poem. A poetic triplet is a tercet in which all three lines follow the same ...
s) 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 do not 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.
At the turn of the 14th century there arrive early examples of the
sonnet sequence A sonnet sequence is a group of sonnets thematically unified to create a long work, although generally, unlike the stanza, each sonnet so connected can also be read as a meaningful separate unit.
The sonnet sequence was a very popular genre during ...
unified about a single theme. This is represented by Folgore da San Geminiano's series on the months of the year, followed by his sequence on the days of the week. At a slightly earlier date, Dante had published his ''
La Vita Nuova
''La Vita Nuova'' (; Italian for "The New Life") or ''Vita Nova'' (Latin title) is a text by Dante Alighieri published in 1294. It is an expression of the medieval genre of courtly love in a prosimetrum style, a combination of both prose and ve ...
'', a narrative commentary in which appear sonnets and other lyrical forms centred on the poet's love for Beatrice. Most of the sonnets there are Petrarchan (here used as a purely stylistic term since Dante predated Petrarch). Chapter VII gives the sonnet "O voi che per la via", with two sestets (AABAAB AABAAB) and two quatrains (CDDC CDDC), and Ch. VIII, "Morte villana", with two sestets (AABBBA AABBBA) and two quatrains (CDDC CDDC). Petrarch followed in his footsteps later in the next century with the 366 sonnets of the ''Canzionere'', which chronicle his life-long love for Laura.
Widespread as sonnet writing became in Italian society, among practitioners were to be found some better known for other things: the painters
Giotto
Giotto di Bondone (; – January 8, 1337), known mononymously as Giotto ( , ) and Latinised as Giottus, was an Italian painter and architect from Florence during the Late Middle Ages. He worked during the Gothic/ Proto-Renaissance period. G ...
Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni
Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni (October 9, 1663March 8, 1728) was an Italian critic and poet. Crescimbeni was a founding member and leader of the erudite literary society of Accademia degli Arcadi in Rome.
Biography
Born in Macerata, which was then ...
lists 661 poets just in the 16th century. So common were they that eventually, in the words of a literary historian, "No event was so trivial, none so commonplace, a tradesman could not open a larger shop, a government clerk could not obtain a few additional ''
scudi
The ''scudo'' (pl. ''scudi'') was the name for a number of coins used in various states in the Italian peninsula until the 19th century. The name, like that of the French écu and the Spanish and Portuguese escudo, was derived from the Latin ''s ...
'' of salary, but all his friends and acquaintance must celebrate the event, and clothe their congratulations in a copy of verses, which almost invariably assumed this shape."
Occitan
The sole confirmed surviving sonnet in the
Occitan language
Occitan (; oc, occitan, link=no ), also known as ''lenga d'òc'' (; french: langue d'oc) by its native speakers, and sometimes also referred to as ''Provençal'', is a Romance language spoken in Southern France, Monaco, Italy's Occitan Vall ...
is by Paolo Lanfranchi da Pistoia and confidently dated to 1284.Bertoni, 119. This employs the rhyme scheme ABAB ABAB CDCDCD and has a political theme, as do some others of dubious authenticity or merit ascribed to "William of Almarichi" and Dante de Maiano.
Catalan
One of the earliest sonnets in
Catalan language
Catalan (; autonym: , ), known in the Valencian Community and Carche as ''Valencian'' (autonym: ), is a Western Romance language. It is the official language of Andorra, and an official language of three autonomous communities in eastern ...
was written by Pere Torroella (1436-1486). In the 16th century, the most prolific and subtle Catalan writer of sonnets was Pere Serafí, author of over 60 published between 1560 and 1565.
Spanish
The poet Íñigo López de Mendoza, 1st Marquis of Santillana is credited as among the foremost to attempt "sonnets written in the Italian manner" (''sonetos fechos al itálico modo'') towards the middle of the 15th century. Since the
Castilian language
In English, Castilian Spanish can mean the variety of Peninsular Spanish spoken in northern and central Spain, the standard form of Spanish, or Spanish from Spain in general. In Spanish, the term (Castilian) can either refer to the Spanish langu ...
and prosody were in a transitional state at the time, the experiment was unsuccessful. It was therefore not until after 1526 that the form was reintroduced by
Juan Boscán
''Juan'' is a given name, the Spanish and Manx versions of '' John''. It is very common in Spain and in other Spanish-speaking communities around the world and in the Philippines, and also (pronounced differently) in the Isle of Man. In Spanis ...
. According to his account, he met Andrea Navagero, the Venetian Ambassador to the Spanish Court, in that year while the latter was accompanying King
Carlos V Charles V may refer to:
* Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (1500–1558)
* Charles V of Naples (1661–1700), better known as Charles II of Spain
* Charles V of France (1338–1380), called the Wise
* Charles V, Duke of Lorraine
Charles V, Duke ...
on a visit to the Alhambra. In the course of their literary discussion, Navagero then suggested that the poet might attempt the sonnet and other Italian forms in his own language.
Boscán not only took up the Venetian's advice but did so in association with the more talented Garcilaso de la Vega, a friend to whom some of his sonnets are addressed and whose early death is mourned in another. The poems of both followed the Petrarchan model, employed the hitherto unfamiliar
hendecasyllable
In poetry, a hendecasyllable (sometimes hendecasyllabic) is a line of eleven syllables. The term may refer to several different poetic meters, the older of which are quantitative and used chiefly in classical (Ancient Greek and Latin) poetry, and ...
, and when writing of love were based on the
neoplatonic
Neoplatonism is a strand of Platonic philosophy that emerged in the 3rd century AD against the background of Hellenistic philosophy and religion. The term does not encapsulate a set of ideas as much as a chain of thinkers. But there are some id ...
ideal championed in
The Book of the Courtier
''The Book of the Courtier'' ( it, Il Cortegiano ) by Baldassare Castiglione is a lengthy philosophical dialogue on the topic of what constitutes an ideal courtier or (in the third chapter) court lady, worthy to befriend and advise a Prince or pol ...
(''Il Cortegiano'') that Boscán had also translated. Their reputation was consolidated by the later 1580 edition of
Fernando de Herrera
Fernando de Herrera (~1534–1597), called "El Divino", was a 16th-century Spanish poet and man of letters. He was born in Seville. Much of what is known about him comes from ''Libro de descripción de verdaderos retratos de illustres y memorable ...
, who was himself accounted "the first major Spanish sonneteer after Garcilaso". During the Baroque period that followed, two notable writers of sonnets headed rival stylistic schools. The
culteranismo
''Culteranismo'' is a stylistic movement of the Baroque period of Spanish history that is also commonly referred to as ''Gongorismo'' (after Luis de Góngora). It began in the late 16th century with the writing of Luis de Góngora and lasted throu ...
of
Luis de Góngora
Luis de Góngora y Argote (born Luis de Argote y Góngora; ; 11 July 1561 – 24 May 1627) was a Spanish Baroque lyric poet and a Catholic priest. Góngora and his lifelong rival, Francisco de Quevedo, are widely considered the most prominent ...
, later known as 'Gongorismo' after him, was distinguished by an artificial style and the use of elaborate vocabulary, complex syntactical order and involved metaphors. The verbal usage of his opponent,
Francisco de Quevedo
Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Santibáñez Villegas, Knight of the Order of Santiago (; 14 September 1580 – 8 September 1645) was a Spanish nobleman, politician and writer of the Baroque era. Along with his lifelong rival, Luis de Góngora ...
, was equally self-consciousness, deploying wordplay and metaphysical
conceit An extended metaphor, also known as a conceit or sustained metaphor, is the use of a single metaphor or analogy at length in a work of literature. It differs from a mere metaphor in its length, and in having more than one single point of contact bet ...
s, after which the style was known as
conceptismo ''Conceptismo'' (literally, conceptism) is a literary movement of the Baroque period in the Spanish literature. It began in the late 16th century and lasted through the 17th century, also the period of the Spanish Golden Age.
''Conceptismo'' is ch ...
.
Another key figure at this period was Lope de Vega, who was responsible for writing some 3,000 sonnets, a large proportion of them incorporated into his dramas. One of the best known and most imitated was ''Un soneto me manda hacer Violante'' (Violante orders me to write a sonnet), which occupies a pivotal position in literary history. At its first appearance in his 1617 comedy ''La niña de Plata'' (Act 3), the character there pretends to be a novice whose text is a running commentary on the poem's creation. Although the poet himself is portrayed as composing it as a light-hearted impromptu in the biographical film ''Lope'' (2010), there had in fact been precedents. In Spanish some fifty years before, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza had written the pretended impromptu, ''Pedís, Reina, un soneto''; and even earlier in Italian there had been the similarly themed ''Qualunque vuol saper fare un sonetto'' (Whoever to make a sonnet aspires) by the Florentine poet Pieraccio Tedaldi (b. ca. 1285–1290; d. ca. 1350). Later imitations in other languages include one in Italian by
Giambattista Marino
Giovanni Battista was a common Italian given name (see Battista for those with the surname) in the 16th-18th centuries. It refers to "John the Baptist" in English, the French equivalent is "Jean-Baptiste". Common nicknames include Giambattista, Gi ...
and another in French by
François-Séraphin Régnier-Desmarais
François-Séraphin Régnier-Desmarais (13 August 1632, Paris - 6 September 1713, Paris) was a French ecclesiastic, grammarian, diplomat and poet in French, Spanish and Latin. He also translated Alphonsus Rodriguez's ''The Practice of Christian Pe ...
, as well as an adaptation of the idea applied to the rondeau by
Vincent Voiture
Vincent Voiture (24 February 1597 – 26 May 1648), French poet and writer of prose, was the son of a rich wine merchant of Amiens. He was introduced by a schoolfellow, the count Claude d'Avaux, to Gaston, Duke of Orléans, and accompanied him ...
. The poem's fascination for U.S. writers is evidenced by no less than five translations in the second half of the 20th century alone.
The sonnet form crossed the Atlantic quite early in the Spanish colonial enterprise when Francisco de Terrazas, the son of a 16th-century conquistador, was among its Mexican pioneers. Later came two sonnet writers in holy orders, Bishop Miguel de Guevara (1585-1646) and, especially, Sister
Juana Inés de la Cruz
''Doña'' Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana, better known as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (12 November 1648 – 17 April 1695) was a Mexican writer, philosopher, composer and poet of the Baroque period, and Hieronymite nun. Her contribut ...
. But though sonnets continued to be written in both the old world and the new, innovation was mainly limited to the Americas, where the sonnet was used to express a different and post-colonial reality. In the 19th century, for example, there were two poets who wrote memorable sonnets dedicated to Mexican landscapes,
Joaquín Acadio Pagaza y Ordóñez
Joaquín Acadio Pagaza y Ordóñez was a Mexican ecclesiastic, writer and translator, born 6 January, 1839 in Valle de Bravo, died 15 July 1918 in Xalapa.
Life and work
Pagaza was ordained in 1864 and served in various capacities until he was ma ...
in the torrid zone to the south and Manuel José Othón in the desolate north. In South America, too, the sonnet was used to invoke landscape, particularly in the major collections of the Uruguayan
Julio Herrera y Reissig
Julio Herrera y Reissig (January 9, 1875 – March 18, 1910) was a Uruguayan poet, playwright and essayist, who began his career during the late Romanticist period and later became an early proponent of Modernism.
Background
He was the son ...
, such as ''Los Parques Abandonados'' (Deserted Parks, 1902–08) and ''Los éxtasis de la montaña'' (Mountain Ecstasies, 1904–07), whose recognisably authentic pastoral scenes went on to serve as example for Cesar Vallejo in his evocations of Andean Peru.
Soon afterwards the sonnet form was deconstructed as part of the modernist questioning of the past. Thus, in the Argentine poet
Alfonsina Storni
Alfonsina Storni (22 May 1892 – 25 October 1938) was an Argentine poet and playwright of the modernist period.
Early life
Storni was born on May 29, 1892 in Sala Capriasca, Switzerland. Her parents were Alfonso Storni and Paola Martignoni, who ...
's ''Mascarilla y trébol'' (Mask and Clover, 1938), a section of unrhymed poems using many of the traditional versification structures of the form are presented under the title "antisonnets".
Portuguese
The first sonnets in Portuguese literature are ascribed to Dom Pedro in the early 15th century. A son of King John I, he was also responsible for translations of sonnets by Petrarch. But the form did not come into its own until the following century in the work of
Luís de Camões
Luís Vaz de Camões (; sometimes rendered in English as Camoens or Camoëns, ; c. 1524 or 1525 – 10 June 1580) is considered Portugal's and the Portuguese language's greatest poet. His mastery of verse has been compared to that of Shakespear ...
, who generally follows the styles of
Italian poetry
Italian poetry is a category of Italian literature. Italian poetry has its origins in the thirteenth century and has heavily influenced the poetic traditions of many European languages, including that of English.
Features
* Italian prosody is a ...
, though in them the influence of the Spanish pioneers of the form has also been discerned. Among later writers, the comic sonnets of Thomas de Noronha were once appreciated, and the love sonnets of Barbosa Bacellar (c.1610-1663), also known for his learned glosses on the sonnets of Camões.
The introduction of a purified sonnet style to
Brazilian literature
Brazilian literature is the literature written in the Portuguese language by Brazilians or in Brazil, including works written prior to the country's independence in 1822. Throughout its early years, literature from Brazil followed the literary t ...
was due to Cláudio Manuel da Costa, who also composed Petrarchan sonnets in Italian during his stay in Europe. However, it was in the wake of French Parnassianism that there developed a similar movement in Brazil which included the notable sonneteers Alberto de Oliveira, Raimundo Correia and, especially,
Olavo Bilac
Olavo Brás Martins dos Guimarães Bilac (16 December 1865 – 28 December 1918), known simply as Olavo Bilac (), was a Brazilian Parnassian poet, journalist and translator. Alongside Alberto de Oliveira and Raimundo Correia, he was a member o ...
. Others writing sonnets in that style included the now overlooked Francisca Júlia da Silva Munster (1871-1920) and the Symbolist
Afro-Brazilian
Afro-Brazilians ( pt, afro-brasileiros; ) are Brazilians who have predominantly African ancestry (see " preto"). Most members of another group of people, multiracial Brazilians or ''pardos'', may also have a range of degree of African ancestry. ...
In French prosody, sonnets are traditionally composed in the
French alexandrine
The French alexandrine (french: alexandrin) is a syllabic poetic metre of (nominally and typically) 12 syllables with a medial caesura dividing the line into two hemistichs (half-lines) of six syllables each. It was the dominant long line of Fren ...
, which consists of lines of twelve syllables with a central
caesura
300px, An example of a caesura in modern western music notation
A caesura (, . caesuras or caesurae; Latin for " cutting"), also written cæsura and cesura, is a metrical pause or break in a verse where one phrase ends and another phrase begin ...
. Imitations of Petrarch were first introduced by
Clément Marot
Clément Marot (23 November 1496 – 12 September 1544) was a French Renaissance poet.
Biography
Youth
Marot was born at Cahors, the capital of the province of Quercy, some time during the winter of 1496–1497. His father, Jean Marot (c.& ...
, and
Mellin de Saint-Gelais
Mellin de Saint-Gelais (or ''Melin de Saint-Gelays'' or ''Sainct-Gelais''; c. 1491 – October, 1558) was a French poet of the Renaissance and Poet Laureate of Francis I of France.
Life
He was born at Angoulême, most likely the natural ...
also took up the form near the start of the 16th century. They were later followed by
Pierre de Ronsard
Pierre de Ronsard (; 11 September 1524 – 27 December 1585) was a French poet or, as his own generation in France called him, a " prince of poets".
Early life
Pierre de Ronsard was born at the Manoir de la Possonnière, in the village of ...
,
Joachim du Bellay
Joachim du Bellay (; – 1 January 1560) was a French poet, critic, and a founder of the Pléiade. He notably wrote the manifesto of the group: '' Défense et illustration de la langue française'', which aimed at promoting French as an a ...
and Jean Antoine de Baïf, around whom formed a group of radical young noble poets of the court, generally known today as
La Pléiade
La Pléiade () was a group of 16th-century French Renaissance poets whose principal members were Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay and Jean-Antoine de Baïf. The name was a reference to another literary group, the original Alexandrian Pleiad ...
. They employed, amongst other forms of poetry, the Petrarchan sonnet cycle, developed around an amorous encounter or an idealized woman. The character of the group's 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 and purification.
In the aftermath of the
Wars of Religion
A religious war or a war of religion, sometimes also known as a holy war ( la, sanctum bellum), is a war which is primarily caused or justified by differences in religion. In the modern period, there are frequent debates over the extent to wh ...
, French Catholic jurist and poet Jean de La Ceppède published the ''Theorems'', a sequence of 515 sonnets with non-traditional rhyme schemes, about the Passion and Resurrection of
Jesus Christ
Jesus, likely from he, יֵשׁוּעַ, translit=Yēšūaʿ, label=Hebrew/Aramaic ( AD 30 or 33), also referred to as Jesus Christ or Jesus of Nazareth (among other names and titles), was a first-century Jewish preacher and religious ...
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
and
Roman Mythology
Roman mythology is the body of myths of ancient Rome as represented in the literature and visual arts of the Romans. One of a wide variety of genres of Roman folklore, ''Roman mythology'' may also refer to the modern study of these representa ...
Saint Francis de Sales
Francis de Sales (french: François de Sales; it, Francesco di Sales; 21 August 156728 December 1622) was a Bishop of Geneva and is revered as a saint in the Catholic Church. He became noted for his deep faith and his gentle approach to ...
for transforming "the Pagan Muses into Christian ones." La Ceppède's sonnets often attack the
Calvinist
Calvinism (also called the Reformed Tradition, Reformed Protestantism, Reformed Christianity, or simply Reformed) is a major branch of Protestantism that follows the theological tradition and forms of Christian practice set down by John Ca ...
doctrine of a judgmental and unforgiving God by focusing on Christ's passionate love for the
human race
Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, culture, ...
. Afterwards the work was long forgotten, until the 20th century witnessed a revival of interest in the poet, and his sonnets are now regarded as classic works of French poetry.
By the late 17th century the sonnet had fallen out of fashion but was revived by the
Romantics
Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate ...
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (7 April 177023 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication '' Lyrical Ballads'' (1798).
Wordsworth's ' ...
's "Scorn not the sonnet" where, in addition to the poets enumerated in the English original - Shakespeare, Petrarch, Tasso, Camoens, Dante, Spenser, Milton – Sainte-Beuve announces his own intention to revive the form and adds the names of Du Bellay and Ronsard in the final tercet. The form was little used, however, until the Parnassians brought it back into favour. From that time on there were many deviations from the traditional sonnet form.
Charles Baudelaire
Charles Pierre Baudelaire (, ; ; 9 April 1821 – 31 August 1867) was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist and art critic. His poems exhibit mastery in the handling of rhyme and rhythm, contain an exoticism inherited ...
was responsible for significant variations in rhyme-scheme and line-length in the poems included in ''
Les Fleurs du mal
''Les Fleurs du mal'' (; en, The Flowers of Evil, italic=yes) is a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire.
''Les Fleurs du mal'' includes nearly all Baudelaire's poetry, written from 1840 until his death in August 1867. First publish ...
''. Among the variations made by others,
Théodore de Banville
Théodore Faullain de Banville (14 March 1823 – 13 March 1891) was a French poet and writer. His work was influential on the Symbolist movement in French literature in the late 19th century.
Biography
Banville was born in Moulins in Allier, A ...
's ''Sur une dame blonde'' limited itself to a four-syllable line, while in ''À une jeune morte'' Jules de Rességuier (1788 - 1862) composed a sonnet monosyllabically lined.
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516/1517 – 19 January 1547), KG, was an English nobleman, politician and poet. He was one of the founders of English Renaissance poetry and was the last known person executed at the instance of King Henry VII ...
, have been described as "the first English Petrarchans" from their pioneering the sonnet form in English. In addition, some twenty five of Wyatt's poems are dependent on Petrarch, either as translations or imitations, while, of Surrey's five, three of them are translations and two imitations. In one instance, both poets translated the same poem, ''Rime'' 140. From these examples, as elsewhere in their prosodic practice, a difference between their style can be observed. Wyatt's verse metre, though in general decasyllabic, is irregular and proceeds by way of significantly stressed phrasal units. But in addition Wyatt's sonnets are generally closer in construction to those of Petrarch.
Prosodically, Surrey is more adept at composing in
iambic pentameter
Iambic pentameter () is a type of metric line used in traditional English poetry and verse drama. The term describes the rhythm, or meter, established by the words in that line; rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables called " feet". "Iam ...
and his sonnets are written in what has come to be known anachronistically as Shakespearean measure. This version of the sonnet form, characterised by three alternately rhymed quatrains terminating in a final couplet (ABAB CDCD, EFEF, GG), became the favourite during
Elizabethan times
The Elizabethan era is the epoch in the Tudor period of the history of England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603). Historians often depict it as the golden age in English history. The symbol of Britannia (a female personific ...
, when it was widely used. It was particularly so in whole series of amatory sequences, beginning with Sir
Philip Sidney
Philip, also Phillip, is a male given name, derived from the Greek (''Philippos'', lit. "horse-loving" or "fond of horses"), from a compound of (''philos'', "dear", "loved", "loving") and (''hippos'', "horse"). Prominent Philips who popularize ...
's '' Astrophel and Stella'' (1591) and continuing over a period of two decades. About four thousand sonnets were composed during this time. However, with such a volume, much there that was conventional and repetitious came to be viewed with a sceptical eye.
Sir John Davies
Sir John Davies (16 April 1569 (baptised)8 December 1626) was an English poet, lawyer, and politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1597 and 1621. He became Attorney General for Ireland and formulated many of the legal ...
mocked these in a series of nine 'gulling sonnets' and
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...
was also to dismiss some of them in his
Sonnet 130
William Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 mocks the conventions of the showy and flowery courtly sonnets in its realistic portrayal of his mistress.
Synopsis
Sonnet 130 satirizes the concept of ideal beauty that was a convention of literature and art in ...
, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”.
Shakespeare's sequence of 154 sonnets departs from the norm in addressing more than one person in its course, male as well as female. In addition, other sonnets by him were incorporated into some of his plays. Another exception at this time was the form used in Edmund Spenser's ''Amoretti'', which has the interlaced rhyme scheme ABAB BCBC CDCD EE. And soon after, in the following century, John Donne adapted the emerging Baroque style to the new subject matter of his series of ''
Holy Sonnets
The ''Holy Sonnets''—also known as the ''Divine Meditations'' or ''Divine Sonnets''—are a series of nineteen poems by the English poet John Donne (1572–1631). The sonnets were first published in 1633—two years after Donne's death. The ...
''.
John Milton's sonnets constitute a special case and demonstrate another stylistic transition. Two youthful examples in English and five in Italian are Petrarchan in spirit. But the seventeen sonnets of his maturity address personal and political themes. It has been observed of their intimate tone, and the way the sense overrides the volta within the poem in some cases, that Milton is here adapting the sonnet form to that of the Horatian ode. He also seems to have been the first to introduce an Italian variation of the form, the
caudate sonnet
A caudate sonnet is an expanded version of the sonnet. It consists of 14 lines in standard sonnet forms followed by a coda (Latin ''cauda'' meaning "tail", from which the name is derived).
The invention of the form is credited to Francesco Berni. ...
, into English in his prolongation of "On the New Forcers of Conscience Under the Long Parliament".
18th-19th centuries
The fashion for the sonnet went out with the Restoration, and hardly any were written between 1670 and the second half of the 18th century. Amongst the first to revive the form was
Thomas Warton
Thomas Warton (9 January 172821 May 1790) was an English literary historian, critic, and poet. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1785, following the death of William Whitehead.
He is sometimes called ''Thomas Warton the younger'' to disti ...
, who took Milton for his model. Around him at Oxford were grouped those associated with him in this revival, including John Codrington Bampfylde, Thomas Russell, Thomas Warwick and Henry Headley, some of whom published small collections of sonnets alone. Many women, too, now took up the sonnet form, in particular Charlotte Smith, whose lachrymose ''Elegiac Sonnets'' (1784 onwards) are credited with helping create the 'school of sensibility' characteristic of the time.
William Lisle Bowles
William Lisle Bowles (24 September 17627 April 1850) was an English priest, poet and critic.
Life and career
Bowles was born at King's Sutton, Northamptonshire, where his father was vicar. At the age of 14 he entered Winchester College, where ...
was also a close follower, but the success of both stirred up resistance in the poetic politics of the time.
William Beckford parodied Smith's melancholy manner and archaic diction in an "Elegiac sonnet to a mopstick". In the preface to his 1796 collection ''Poems on Various Subjects'',
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (; 21 October 177225 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake ...
commented of his series of "Effusions" that "I was fearful that the title "Sonnet" might have reminded my reader of the Poems of the Rev. W. L. Bowles – a comparison with whom would have sunk me below that mediocrity, on the surface of which I am at present enabled to float". There were formal objections too. Where most of the early revivalists had used Milton's sonnets as the model for theirs, Smith and Bowles had preferred the Shakespearean form. This led to
Mary Robinson
Mary Therese Winifred Robinson ( ga, Máire Mhic Róibín; ; born 21 May 1944) is an Irish politician who was the 7th president of Ireland, serving from December 1990 to September 1997, the first woman to hold this office. Prior to her electi ...
's fighting preface to her sequence ''Sappho and Phaon'', in which she asserted the legitimacy of the Petrarchan form as used by Milton over "the non-descript ephemera from the heated brains of self-important poetasters" that pass as sonnets in the literary reviews of her day.
The example which later impressed Wordsworth the most was that of Milton's sonnets, which he described in 1803 as having "an energetic and varied flow of sound, crowding into narrow room more of the combined effect of rhyme and blank verse, than can be done by any other kind of verse I know of". Thus aware that its compression was applicable to a great variety of themes, Wordsworth eventually wrote some 523 sonnets which were to exert a powerful stylistic influence throughout the first half of the 19th century. Part of his appeal to others was the way in which he used the sonnet as a focus for new subject matter, frequently in sequences. From his series on the River Duddon sprang reflections on any number of regional natural features; his travel tour effusions, though not always confined to sonnet form, found many imitators. What eventually became three series of ''Ecclesiastical Sonnets'' started a vogue for sonnets on religious and devotional themes. Milton's predilection for political themes, continuing through Wordsworth's "Sonnets dedicated to liberty and order", now became an example for contemporaries too. Barely had the process begun, however, before a sceptical alarmist in ''
The New Monthly Magazine
''The New Monthly Magazine'' was a British monthly magazine published from 1814 to 1884. It was founded by Henry Colburn and published by him through to 1845.
History
Colburn and Frederic Shoberl established ''The New Monthly Magazine and Univ ...
'' for 1821 was diagnosing "sonnettomania" as a new sickness akin to "the bite of a rabid animal".
Another arm of the propaganda on behalf of the sonnet in
Romantic times
''Romantic Times'' was an American genre magazine specializing in romance novel
A romance novel or romantic novel generally refers to a type of genre fiction novel which places its primary focus on the relationship and romantic love betwee ...
was the reflexive strategy of recommending it in sonnet form as a demonstration of its possibility of variation. In Wordsworth's "Nuns fret not at their narrow room" (1807), the volta comes after the seventh line, dividing the poem into two equal parts. Keats makes use of frequent enjambment in "If by dull rhymes our English must be chained" (1816) and divides its sense units into four tercets and a couplet. What Keats is recommending there is the more intricate rhyming system A B C , A B D , C A B , C D E, D E that he demonstrates in its course as a means of giving the form greater breathing room. Wordsworth later accomplishes this in "Scorn not the Sonnet" (1827), which is without midway division, and where enjambment is so managed that the sense overrides from line to line in an ode-like movement. With the similar aim of freeing the form from its fetters,
Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold (24 December 1822 – 15 April 1888) was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the celebrated headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, lit ...
turns his "Austerity of poetry" (1867) into a narrative carried forward over an enjambed eighth line to a conclusion that is limited to the final three lines.
By the time the second half of the 19th century was reached, sonnets become chiefly interesting for their publication in long sequences. It was during this period that attempts to renew the form were continually being made. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's autobiographical ''
Sonnets from the Portuguese
''Sonnets from the Portuguese'', written ca. 1845–1846 and published first in 1850, is a collection of 44 love sonnets written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The collection was acclaimed and popular during the poet's lifetime and it remain ...
'' (1845–50), for example, is described as the first depiction of a successful courtship since Elizabethan times. It comprises 44 sonnets of dramatised first person narrative, the enjambed lines in which frequently avoid resting at the volta. Through this means the work is distinguished by "the flexibility and control with which the verse bends to the argument and to the rhythms of thought and speech".
That sequence was followed in 1862 by
George Meredith
George Meredith (12 February 1828 – 18 May 1909) was an English novelist and poet of the Victorian era. At first his focus was poetry, influenced by John Keats among others, but he gradually established a reputation as a novelist. '' The Ord ...
's ''Modern Love'', based in part on the breakdown of his first marriage. It employs a 16-line form, described as (and working like) a sonnet, linking together the work's fifty narrative episodes. Essentially the stanza is made up of four quatrains of
enclosed rhyme
Enclosed rhyme (or enclosing rhyme) is the rhyme scheme ABBA (that is, where the first and fourth lines, and the second and third lines rhyme). Enclosed-rhyme quatrains are used in introverted quatrains, as in the first two stanzas of Petrarchan ...
, rhythmically driven forward over these divisions so as to allow a greater syntactical complexity "more readily associated with the realist novel than with lyric poetry". As other work by both the writers above demonstrates, they were capable of more straightforward fictions. In adapting the sonnet to the narrative mode, the main interest for them is in overcoming the technical challenge that they set themselves and proving the new possibilities of the form in which they are working.
Where the first quatrain in ''Sonnets from the Portuguese'' began with a reminiscence of lines from a pastoral of
Theocritus
Theocritus (; grc-gre, Θεόκριτος, ''Theokritos''; born c. 300 BC, died after 260 BC) was a Greek poet from Sicily and the creator of Ancient Greek pastoral poetry.
Life
Little is known of Theocritus beyond what can be inferred from h ...
, Edward Cracroft Lefroy (1855-1891) responded by reaching beyond the narrative mode towards the dramatic in the thirty adaptations from the Greek of his ''Echoes from Theocritus'' (1885, reprint 1922). Beyond this, though the idea of arranging such material in a sequence was original to Lefroy, Thomas Warwick had anticipated the approach a century before in his sonnet "From
Bacchylides
Bacchylides (; grc-gre, Βακχυλίδης; – ) was a Greek lyric poet. Later Greeks included him in the canonical list of Nine Lyric Poets, which included his uncle Simonides. The elegance and polished style of his lyrics have been noted ...
", equally based on a fragment of an ancient Greek author. On the other hand,
Eugene Lee-Hamilton
Eugene Lee-Hamilton (6 January 1845 – 9 September 1907) was a late Victorian English poet. His work includes some notable sonnets in the style of Petrarch. He endowed a literary prize administered by Oriel College in Oxford University, whe ...
's exploration of the sonnet's dramatic possibilities was through creating historical monologues in his hundred ''Imaginary Sonnets'' (1888), based on episodes chosen from the seven centuries between 1120 – 1820. Neither sequence was anywhere the equal of those of Barrett Browning or Meredith, but they illustrate a contemporary urge to make new a form that was fast running out of steam.
20th century
As part of his attempted renewal of poetic prosody, Gerard Manley Hopkins had applied his experimental
sprung rhythm
Sprung rhythm is a poetic rhythm designed to imitate the rhythm of natural speech. It is constructed from feet in which the first syllable is stressed and may be followed by a variable number of unstressed syllables. The British poet Gerard Manle ...
to the composition of the sonnet, amplifying the number of unstressed syllables within a five- (or occasionally six-) stressed line – as in the rhetorical " The Windhover", for example . He also introduced variations in the proportions of the sonnet, from the 10 lines of the
curtal sonnet
The curtal sonnet is a form invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and used in three of his poems.
It is an eleven-line (or, more accurately, ten-and-a-half-line) sonnet, but rather than the first eleven lines of a standard sonnet it consists of pre ...
"
Pied Beauty
"Pied Beauty" is a curtal sonnet by the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889). It was written in 1877, but not published until 1918, when it was included as part of the collection ''Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins''. The Classic Hundr ...
" to the amplified 24-line
caudate sonnet
A caudate sonnet is an expanded version of the sonnet. It consists of 14 lines in standard sonnet forms followed by a coda (Latin ''cauda'' meaning "tail", from which the name is derived).
The invention of the form is credited to Francesco Berni. ...
"That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire". Though they were written in the later Victorian era, the poems remained virtually unknown until they were published in 1918.
The undergraduate
W. H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden (; 21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973) was a British-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in ...
is sometimes credited with dispensing with rhyme altogether in "The Secret Agent", but went on to write many conventional sonnets, including two long sequences during the time of international crisis: "In Time of War" (1939) and "The Quest" (1940). Sequences by some others have been more experimental and looser in form, of which a radical example was "Altarwise by owl-light" (1935), ten irregular and barely rhyming quatorzains by Dylan Thomas in his most opaque manner.
In 1978 two later innovatory sequences were published at a period when it was considered that "the sonnet seems to want to lie fallow, exhausted", in the words of one commentator. Peter Dale's book-length ''One Another'' contains a dialogue of some sixty sonnets in which the variety of rhyming methods are as diverse as the emotions expressed between the speakers there. At the same time,
Geoffrey Hill
Sir Geoffrey William Hill, FRSL (18 June 1932 – 30 June 2016) was an English poet, professor emeritus of English literature and religion, and former co-director of the Editorial Institute, at Boston University. Hill has been considered to be ...
's "An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England" appeared in ''Tenebrae'' (1978), where the challenging thirteen poems of the sequence employ half-rhyme and generally ignore the volta.
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Justin Heaney (; 13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.
also wrote two sequences during this period: the personal "Glanmore Sonnets" in ''Field Work'' (1975); and the more freely constructed elegiac sonnets of "Clearances" in '' The Haw Lantern'' (1987).
In North America
USA
The earliest American sonnet is David Humphreys's 1776 sonnet "Addressed to my Friends at Yale College, on my Leaving them to join the Army". The sonnet form was used widely thereafter, including by
William Lloyd Garrison
William Lloyd Garrison (December , 1805 – May 24, 1879) was a prominent American Christian, abolitionist, journalist, suffragist, and social reformer. He is best known for his widely read antislavery newspaper '' The Liberator'', which he foun ...
and
William Cullen Bryant
William Cullen Bryant (November 3, 1794 – June 12, 1878) was an American romantic poet, journalist, and long-time editor of the ''New York Evening Post''. Born in Massachusetts, he started his career as a lawyer but showed an interest in poetry ...
. Later,
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807 – March 24, 1882) was an American poet and educator. His original works include " Paul Revere's Ride", '' The Song of Hiawatha'', and ''Evangeline''. He was the first American to completely tran ...
and others followed suit. His were characterised by a "purple richness of diction" and by their use of material images to illustrate niceties of thought and emotion. He also translated several sonnets, including seven by Michelangelo. Later on, among
Emma Lazarus
Emma Lazarus (July 22, 1849 – November 19, 1887) was an American author of poetry, prose, and translations, as well as an activist for Jewish and Georgist causes. She is remembered for writing the sonnet " The New Colossus", which was inspire ...
' many sonnets, perhaps the best-known is "
The New Colossus
"The New Colossus" is a sonnet by American poet Emma Lazarus (1849–1887). She wrote the poem in 1883 to raise money for the construction of a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty (''Liberty Enlightening the World''). In 1903, the poem was cast ...
" of 1883, which celebrates the Statue of Liberty and its role in welcoming immigrants to the New World.
In the 19th century, sonnets written by American poets began to be anthologised as such. They were included in a separate section in Leigh Hunt and S. Adams' ''The Book of the Sonnet'' (London and Boston, 1867), which included an essay by Adams on "American Sonnets and Sonneteers" and a section devoted only to sonnets by American women. Later came William Sharp's anthology of ''American Sonnets'' (1889) and Charles H. Crandall's ''Representative sonnets by American poets, with an essay on the sonnet, its nature and history'' ( Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1890). The essay also surveyed the whole history of the sonnet, including English examples and European examples in translation, in order to contextualise the American achievement.
Recent scholarship has recovered many
African American
African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ens ...
sonnets that were not anthologised in standard American poetry volumes. Important nineteenth and early twentieth century writers have included
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Paul Laurence Dunbar (June 27, 1872 – February 9, 1906) was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born in Dayton, Ohio, to parents who had been enslaved in Kentucky before the American C ...
Countee Cullen
Countee Cullen (born Countee LeRoy Porter; May 30, 1903 – January 9, 1946) was an American poet, novelist, children's writer, and playwright, particularly well known during the Harlem Renaissance.
Early life
Childhood
Countee LeRoy Porter ...
, Langston Hughes, and Sterling A. Brown. Several African American women poets won prizes for volumes that included sonnets, such as
Margaret Walker
Margaret Walker (Margaret Abigail Walker Alexander by marriage; July 7, 1915 – November 30, 1998) was an American poet and writer. She was part of the African-American literary movement in Chicago, known as the Chicago Black Renaissance. H ...
Rita Dove
Rita Frances Dove (born August 28, 1952) is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the positi ...
(Pulitzer Prize), and
Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey (born April 26, 1966) is an American poet who was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 2012 and again in 2013. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection ''Native Guard'', and she is a former Poet L ...
(Pulitzer Prize). Though Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka were to question the appropriateness of the sonnet for Black poetry, both had published sonnets themselves.
One aspect of the American sonnet during the 20th century was the publication of sequences which had to wait decades for critical recognition. One instance is ''This Man's Army: A War in Fifty-Odd Sonnets'' (1928) by John Allan Wyeth. A series of irregular sonnets that recorded impressions of his military service with the American Expeditionary Force during
World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
, it was scarcely noticed when it first appeared. Yet on its republication in 2008,
Dana Gioia
Michael Dana Gioia (; born December 24, 1950) is an American poet, literary critic, literary translator, and essayist.
Since the early 1980s, Gioia has been considered part of the literary movements within American poetry known as New Forma ...
asserted in his introduction that Wyeth is the only American poet of the Great War who can stand comparison to British
war poet
A war poet is a poet who participates in a war and writes about their experiences, or a non-combatant who writes poems about war. While the term is applied especially to those who served during the First World War, the term can be applied to a p ...
s, a claim later corroborated by Jon Stallworthy in his review of the work.
Shortly afterwards, H. P. Lovecraft wrote his very different sonnet sequence, sections of which first appeared in genre magazines. It was not until 1943 that it saw complete publication as Fungi from Yuggoth. These 36 poems were written in a hybrid form based on the
Petrarchan sonnet
The Petrarchan sonnet, also known as the Italian sonnet, is a sonnet named after the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca, although it was not developed by Petrarch himself, but rather by a string of Renaissance poets.Spiller, Michael R. G. The Develop ...
that invariably ends with a rhyming couplet reminiscent of the
Shakespearean sonnet
A sonnet is a poetic form that originated in the poetry composed at the Court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the Sicilian city of Palermo. The 13th-century poet and notary Giacomo da Lentini is credited with the sonnet's invention ...
. Most of these poems are discontinuous, though unified by theme, being vignettes descriptive of the kinds of dreamed and otherworldly scenarios found in Lovecraft's fiction. Their unmannered style was once compared to Edward Arlington Robinson's, but since then a case has been made for the work as minor poetry of contemporary importance in its own right.
In the case of
John Berryman
John Allyn McAlpin Berryman (born John Allyn Smith, Jr.; October 25, 1914 – January 7, 1972) was an American poet and scholar. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and is considered a key figure in th ...
, he initially wrote a series of some hundred modernistic love sonnets during the 1940s. These, however, remained uncollected until 1967, when they appeared as ''Berryman’s Sonnets'', fleshed out with a few additions to give them the form of a sequence. In her 2014 survey of the book for ''
Poetry
Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings i ...
'', April Bernard suggests that he was there making of 'Berryman' a similar semi-fictional character to the 'Henry' in The Dream Songs (1964). She also identifies an ancient ancestry for the disordered syntax of the work through the English poets Thomas Wyatt and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
But at this time too began to appear sequences of quatorzains with only a tenuous relationship to the sonnet form. Ted Berrigan's ''The Sonnets'' (1964) discard metre and rhyme but retain the dynamics of a 14-line structure with a change of direction at the volta. Berrigan claimed to have been inspired by "Shakespeare’s sonnets because they were quick, musical, witty and short". Others have described Berrigan's work as a postmodern collage using "repetition, rearrangement, and the use of 'found' phrases and text", that functions as a "radical deconstruction of the sonnet". From 1969 Robert Lowell too began publishing a less radical deconstruction of the form in his series of five collections of
blank verse
Blank verse is poetry written with regular metrical but unrhymed lines, almost always in iambic pentameter. It has been described as "probably the most common and influential form that English poetry has taken since the 16th century", and Pa ...
sonnets, including his Pulitzer Prize volume ''The Dolphin'' (1973). These he described as having “the eloquence at best of iambic pentameter, and often the structure and climaxes of sonnets".
The contemporary reaction against the strict form is described in the introduction to William Baer's anthology ''Sonnets: 150 Contemporary Sonnets'' (2005). But for all that a number of writers were declaring then that the sonnet was dead, others – including
Richard Wilbur
Richard Purdy Wilbur (March 1, 1921 – October 14, 2017) was an American poet and literary translator. One of the foremost poets of his generation, Wilbur's work, composed primarily in traditional forms, was marked by its wit, charm, and gentle ...
,
Howard Nemerov
Howard Nemerov (March 1, 1920 – July 5, 1991) was an American poet. He was twice Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, from 1963 to 1964 and again from 1988 to 1990. For ''The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov'' (1977) ...
and
Anthony Hecht
Anthony Evan Hecht (January 16, 1923 – October 20, 2004) was an American poet. His work combined a deep interest in form with a passionate desire to confront the horrors of 20th century history, with the World War II, Second World War, in which ...
– continued to write sonnets and eventually became associated with the magazines '' The Formalist'' and then '' Measure''. These journals, champions of the
New Formalism
New Formalism is a late 20th- and early 21st-century movement in American poetry that has promoted a return to metrical, rhymed verse and narrative poetry on the grounds that all three are necessary if American poetry is to compete with novels an ...
between the years 1994 and 2017, sponsored the annual
Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award The Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award was established in 1994 by ''The Formalist.'' The award, honoring the poet Howard Nemerov (1920–1991), was an open competition for sonnets in English that drew about 3000 entries annually. Essay by three-time Nemer ...
.
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
Seymour Mayne (born 1944 in Montreal, Quebec) is a Canadian author, editor, or translator of more than seventy books and monographs. As he has written about the Jewish Canadian poets, his work is recognizable by its emphasis on the human dimension, ...
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
Paulus Melissus (also: ''Paul Melissus,'' ''Paul Schede'', or ''Paulus Schedius Melissus''; 20 December 1539 – 3 February 1602) was a Humanism, humanist New Latin language, Neo-Latin writer, translator and composer.
Life
Melissus was born i ...
was the first to introduce the sonnet into
German poetry
German literature () comprises those literary texts written in the German language. This includes literature written in Germany, Austria, the German parts of Switzerland and Belgium, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, South Tyrol in Italy and to a les ...
. But the man who did most to raise the sonnet to German consciousness was
Martin Opitz
Martin Opitz von Boberfeld (23 December 1597 – 20 August 1639) was a German poet, regarded as the greatest of that nation during his lifetime.
Biography
Opitz was born in Bunzlau (Bolesławiec) in Lower Silesia, in the Principality of ...
, 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
Daniel is a masculine given name and a surname of Hebrew origin. It means "God is my judge"Hanks, Hardcastle and Hodges, ''Oxford Dictionary of First Names'', Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, , p. 68. (cf. Gabriel—"God is my strength"), ...
. Thereafter in the 18th century,
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic. His works include plays, poetry, literature, and aesthetic criticism, as well as t ...
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
August Wilhelm (after 1812: von) Schlegel (; 8 September 176712 May 1845), usually cited as August Schlegel, was a German poet, translator and critic, and with his brother Friedrich Schlegel the leading influence within Jena Romanticism. His trans ...
Sonnets to Orpheus
The ''Sonnets to Orpheus'' (german: Die Sonette an Orpheus) are 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. Rilke, who is "widely recognized ...
'', 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 ''Duino Elegies'' (german: Duineser Elegien) are a collection of ten elegies written by the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. He was then "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets", and began t ...
. 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 form a distinct category among German sonnets. They include
Friedrich Rückert
Friedrich Rückert (16 May 1788 – 31 January 1866) was a German poet, translator, and professor of Oriental languages.
Biography
Rückert was born in Schweinfurt and was the eldest son of a lawyer. He was educated at the local '' Gymnasium'' ...
Emanuel Geibel
Emanuel von Geibel (17 October 18156 April 1884) was a German poet and playwright.
Life
Geibel was born at Lübeck, the son of a pastor. He was originally intended for his father's profession and studied at Bonn and Berlin, but his real interests ...
written during the
German revolutions of 1848–1849
The German revolutions of 1848–1849 (), the opening phase of which was also called the March Revolution (), were initially part of the Revolutions of 1848 that broke out in many European countries. They were a series of loosely coordinated pro ...
and the
First Schleswig War
The First Schleswig War (german: Schleswig-Holsteinischer Krieg) was a military conflict in southern Denmark and northern Germany rooted in the Schleswig-Holstein Question, contesting the issue of who should control the Duchies of Schleswi ...
. In the wake of World War 1, Anton Schnack, described by one anthologist as "the only German language poet whose work can be compared with that of
Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen MC (18 March 1893 – 4 November 1918) was an English poet and soldier. He was one of the leading poets of the First World War. His war poetry on the horrors of trenches and gas warfare was much influenced b ...
", published the sonnet sequence, ''Tier rang gewaltig mit Tier'' ("Beast Strove Mightily with Beast", 1920). The 60 poems there have the typical German sonnet form, but are written in the long-lined free rhythms developed by Ernst Stadler.Patrick Bridgwater (1985), ''The German Poets of the First World War'', page 97. Patrick Bridgwater, writing in 1985, called the work "without question the best single collection produced by a German
war poet
A war poet is a poet who participates in a war and writes about their experiences, or a non-combatant who writes poems about war. While the term is applied especially to those who served during the First World War, the term can be applied to a p ...
in 1914-18," but adds that it "is to this day virtually unknown even in Germany."
In Dutch
In the Netherlands
Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft
Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft (16 March 1581 – 21 May 1647) - Knight in the Order of Saint Michael - was a Dutch historian, poet and playwright who lived during the Dutch Golden Age in literature.
Life
Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft, often abbreviat ...
introduced sonnets in the Baroque style, of which ''Mijn lief, mijn lief, mijn lief: soo sprack mijn lief mij toe'' presents a notable example of sound and word play. Another of his
sonnets, dedicated to Hugo Grotius, was later translated by
Edmund Gosse
Sir Edmund William Gosse (; 21 September 184916 May 1928) was an English poet, author and critic. He was strictly brought up in a small Protestant sect, the Plymouth Brethren, but broke away sharply from that faith. His account of his childhoo ...
. In later centuries the sonnet form was dropped and then returned to by successive waves of innovators in an attempt to breathe new life into Dutch poetry when, in their eyes, it had lost its way. For the generation of the 1880s it was Jacques Perk's sonnet sequence ''Mathilde'' which served as a rallying cry. And for a while in the early years of the new century, Martinus Nijhoff wrote notable sonnets before turning to more modernistic models.
Following
World War 2
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
, avant-garde poets declared war on all formalism, reacting particularly against the extreme subjectivity and self-agrandisment of representatives of the 1880s style like
Willem Kloos
Willem Johannes Theodorus Kloos (; 6 May 1859 – 31 March 1938) was a nineteenth-century Dutch poet and literary critic. He was one of the prominent figures of the Movement of Eighty and became editor in chief of ''De Nieuwe Gids'' after the ed ...
, who had once begun a sonnet "In my deepest being I'm a god". In reaction,
Lucebert
Lucebert (; Lubertus Jacobus Swaanswijk; 15 September 1924 – 10 May 1994) was a Dutch artist who first became known as the poet of the COBRA movement.
He was born in Amsterdam in 1924. He entered the Institute for Arts and Crafts in 193 ...
satirised such writing in the "sonnet" with which his first collection opened: ::I/ me/ I/ me// me/ I/ me/ I// I/ I/ my// my/ my/ I But by the end of the 20th century, formalist poets such as
Gerrit Komrij
Gerrit Jan Komrij (30 March 1944 – 5 July 2012) was a Dutch poet, novelist, translator, critic, polemic journalist and playwright. He rose to prominence in the early 1970s writing poetry that sharply contrasted with the free-form poetry of his ...
and
Jan Kal
Johannes Pieter "Jan" Kal (born 1946 in Haarlem) is a Dutch poet. He lives in Amsterdam. Along with others, such as Gerrit Komrij, , and , he helped revive the sonnet in Dutch poetry, and substantially all of Kal's work is in sonnet form. His ea ...
were writing sonnets again as part of their own reaction to the experimentalism of earlier decades.
Slavic languages
Czech
The sonnet was introduced into Czech literature at the beginning of the 19th century. The first great Czech sonneteer was
Ján Kollár
Ján Kollár ( hu, Kollár János; 29 July 1793 – 24 January 1852) was a Slovak writer (mainly poet), archaeologist, scientist, priest, politician, and main ideologist of Pan-Slavism.
Life
He studied at the Lutheran Lyceum in Pressburg ( ...
, who wrote a cycle of sonnets named ''Slávy Dcera'' (''The daughter of Sláva'' / ''The daughter of fame''). While Kollár was Slovak, he was a supporter of Pan-Slavism and 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
The ''Divine Comedy'' ( it, Divina Commedia ) is an Italian narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun 1308 and completed in around 1321, shortly before the author's death. It is widely considered the pre-eminent work in Italian literature ...
''. It consists of ''The Prelude'' written in quantitative
hexameter
Hexameter is a metrical line of verses consisting of six feet (a "foot" here is the pulse, or major accent, of words in an English line of poetry; in Greek and Latin a "foot" is not an accent, but describes various combinations of syllables). It w ...
s, and sonnets. The number of poems increased in subsequent editions and came up to 645. 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
Josef Svatopluk Machar (; 1864 – 1942) was a Czech poet and essayist. A leader of the realist movement in Czech poetry and a master of colloquial Czech, Machar was active in anti-Austrian political circles in Vienna. Many of his poems were sati ...
. He published ''Čtyři knihy sonetů'' (''The Four Books of Sonnets''). In the 20th century
Vítězslav Nezval
Vítězslav Nezval (; 26 May 1900 – 6 April 1958) was a Czech poet, writer and translator. He was one of the most prolific avant-garde Czech writers in the first half of the 20th century and a co-founder of the Surrealist movement in Czechos ...
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 Czech alexandrine (in Czech ''český alexandrín'') is a verse form found in Czech poetry of the 20th century. It is a metre based on French alexandrine. The most important features of the pattern are number of syllables (twelve or thirteen) and a ...
. Ondřej Hanus wrote a monograph about Czech Sonnets in the first half of the twentieth century.
Polish
The sonnet was introduced into
Polish literature
Polish literature is the literary tradition of Poland. Most Polish literature has been written in the Polish language, though other languages used in Poland over the centuries have also contributed to Polish literary traditions, including Latin, ...
in the 16th century by
Jan Kochanowski
Jan Kochanowski (; 1530 – 22 August 1584) was a Polish Renaissance poet who established poetic patterns that would become integral to the Polish literary language. He is commonly regarded as the greatest Polish poet before Adam Mickiewicz.
...
national poet
A national poet or national bard is a poet held by tradition and popular acclaim to represent the identity, beliefs and principles of a particular national culture. The national poet as culture hero is a long-standing symbo ...
,
Adam Mickiewicz
Adam Bernard Mickiewicz (; 24 December 179826 November 1855) was a Polish poet, dramatist, essayist, publicist, translator and political activist. He is regarded as national poet in Poland, Lithuania and Belarus. A principal figure in Polish Ro ...
, wrote a
sonnet sequence A sonnet sequence is a group of sonnets thematically unified to create a long work, although generally, unlike the stanza, each sonnet so connected can also be read as a meaningful separate unit.
The sonnet sequence was a very popular genre during ...
known as the ''
Crimean Sonnets
The Crimean Sonnets (''Sonety krymskie'') are a series of 18 Polish sonnets by Adam Mickiewicz, constituting an artistic telling of a journey through the Crimea. They were published in 1826, together with a cycle of love poems called "The Odes ...
Crimean Peninsula
Crimea, crh, Къырым, Qırım, grc, Κιμμερία / Ταυρική, translit=Kimmería / Taurikḗ ( ) is a peninsula in Ukraine, on the northern coast of the Black Sea, that has been occupied by Russia since 2014. It has a pop ...
. Mickiewicz's sonnet sequence focuses heavily on the culture and Islamic religion of the
Crimean Tatars
, flag = Flag of the Crimean Tatar people.svg
, flag_caption = Flag of Crimean Tatars
, image = Love, Peace, Traditions.jpg
, caption = Crimean Tatars in traditional clothing in front of the Khan's Palace ...
. The sequence was translated into English by
Edna Worthley Underwood
Edna Worthley Underwood (January 1873 – June 14, 1961) was an American author, poet, and translator.
Biography
Born in Maine in January 1873, Edna Worthley received little education as a child, attending school occasionally, only when her famil ...
.
Russian
In the 18th century, after the westernizing reforms of Peter the Great, Russian poets (among others
Alexander Sumarokov
Alexander Petrovich Sumarokov (russian: Алекса́ндр Петро́вич Сумаро́ков; , Moscow – , Moscow) was a Russian poet and playwright who single-handedly created classical theatre in Russia, thus assisting Mikhail Lomonos ...
and Mikhail Kheraskov) began to experiment with sonnets, but the form was soon overtaken in popularity by the more flexible
Onegin stanza
Onegin stanza ( Russian: онегинская строфа ''oneginskaya strofa''), sometimes "Pushkin sonnet'' refers to the verse form popularized (or invented) by the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin through his 1825-1832 novel in verse ''Eugene ...
. This was used by
Alexander Pushkin
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (; rus, links=no, Александр Сергеевич ПушкинIn pre-Revolutionary script, his name was written ., r=Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, p=ɐlʲɪkˈsandr sʲɪrˈɡʲe(j)ɪvʲɪtɕ ˈpuʂkʲɪn, ...
for his
novel in verse
A verse novel is a type of narrative poetry in which a novel-length narrative is told through the medium of poetry rather than prose. Either simple or complex stanzaic verse-forms may be used, but there will usually be a large cast, multiple voi ...
''
Eugene Onegin
''Eugene Onegin, A Novel in Verse'' (Reforms of Russian orthography, pre-reform Russian: ; post-reform rus, Евгений Оне́гин, ромáн в стихáх, p=jɪvˈɡʲenʲɪj ɐˈnʲeɡʲɪn, r=Yevgeniy Onegin, roman v stikhakh) is ...
'' and has also been described as the 'Onegin sonnet', since it consists of fourteen lines. It is, however, aberrant in rhyme scheme and the number of stresses per line and is better described as having only a family resemblance to the sonnet. The form was adapted by other poets later, including by
Mikhail Lermontov
Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov (; russian: Михаи́л Ю́рьевич Ле́рмонтов, p=mʲɪxɐˈil ˈjurʲjɪvʲɪtɕ ˈlʲɛrməntəf; – ) was a Russian Romantic writer, poet and painter, sometimes called "the poet of the Caucas ...
in his narrative of "The Tambov Treasurer's Wife".
Slovenian
In Slovenia the sonnet became a national verse form. The greatest Slovenian poet,
France Prešeren
France Prešeren () (2 or 3 December 1800 – 8 February 1849) was a 19th-century Romantic Slovene poet whose poems have been translated into many languages.
, wrote many sonnets. His best known work worldwide is ''Sonetni venec'' (''
A Wreath of Sonnets
''A Wreath of Sonnets'' ( sl, Sonetni venec), sometimes also translated as ''A Garland of Sonnets'', is a crown of sonnets that was written by France Prešeren in 1833. It was published for the first time in the German-language Ljubljana newspaper ...
''), which is an example of
crown of sonnets
A crown of sonnets or sonnet corona is a sequence of sonnets, usually addressed to one person, and/or concerned with a single theme. Each of the sonnets explores one aspect of the theme, and is linked to the preceding and succeeding sonnets by repe ...
. 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
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...
sonnets remained very popular. Slovenian poets write both traditional rhymed sonnets and modern ones, unrhymed, in free verse. Among them are
Milan Jesih
Milan Jesih (born April 14, 1950) is a Slovene language, Slovene poet, playwright, and translator. He was the president of the Slovene Writers' Association between 2009 and 2011.
Jesih was born in Ljubljana in 1950. He studied comparative litera ...
and Aleš Debeljak. The metre for sonnets in Slovenian poetry is
iambic pentameter
Iambic pentameter () is a type of metric line used in traditional English poetry and verse drama. The term describes the rhythm, or meter, established by the words in that line; rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables called " feet". "Iam ...
with
feminine rhyme
Masculine ending and feminine ending are terms used in prosody, the study of verse form. "Masculine ending" refers to a line ending in a stressed syllable. "Feminine ending" is its opposite, describing a line ending in a stressless syllable. T ...
s, based both on the Italian endecasillabo and German iambic pentameter.
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats (13 June 186528 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and became a pillar of the Irish liter ...
,
Tom Kettle
Thomas Michael Kettle (9 February 1880 – 9 September 1916) was an Irish economist, journalist, barrister, writer, war poet, soldier and Home Rule politician. As a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party, he was Member of Parliament (MP) for ...
, and
Patrick Kavanagh
Patrick Kavanagh (21 October 1904 – 30 November 1967) was an Irish poet and novelist. His best-known works include the novel ''Tarry Flynn'', and the poems "On Raglan Road" and "The Great Hunger". He is known for his accounts of Irish life th ...
, the sonnet form failed to enter Irish poetry in the
Irish language
Irish ( Standard Irish: ), also known as Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Insular Celtic branch of the Celtic language family, which is a part of the Indo-European language family. Irish is indigenous to the island of Ireland and was ...
Frongoch internment camp
Frongoch internment camp at Frongoch in Merionethshire, Wales was a makeshift place of imprisonment during the First World War and the 1916 Easter Rising.
History
1916 the camp housed German prisoners of war in a yellow distillery and cru ...
following the Easter Rising. There he became the first poet to write sonnets in the Irish language.
In 2009, poet Muiris Sionóid published a complete translation of
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...
's 154 sonnets into Irish under the title ''Rotha Mór an Ghrá'' ("The Great Wheel of Love")."Shakespeare's work has been translated into Irish - and it sounds amazing" ''
The Irish Post
''The Irish Post'' is a national newspaper for the Irish community in Great Britain. It is published every Wednesday and is sold in shops in Britain and Ireland.
History
The first print edition of ''The Irish Post'' was published on Friday, ...
'' 14 March 2018. 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
Iambic pentameter () is a type of metric line used in traditional English poetry and verse drama. The term describes the rhythm, or meter, established by the words in that line; rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables called " feet". "Iam ...
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.
In Welsh
* See
Welsh poetry
Welsh poetry refers to poetry of the Welsh people or nation. This includes poetry written in Welsh, poetry written in English by Welsh or Wales based poets, poetry written in Wales in other languages or poetry by Welsh poets around the world.
...
According to
Jan Morris
(Catharine) Jan MorrisJan Morris, Paul Clements, University of Wales Press, 2008, p. 7 (born James Humphry Morris; 2 October 192620 November 2020) was a Welsh historian, author and travel writer. She was known particularly for the ''Pax Brita ...
, "When Welsh poets speak of
Free Verse
Free verse is an open form of poetry, which in its modern form arose through the French '' vers libre'' form. It does not use consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any musical pattern. It thus tends to follow the rhythm of natural speech.
Defi ...
, they mean forms like the sonnet or the ode, which obey the same rules as
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
poesy. Strict Metres verse still honours the complex rules laid down for correct poetic composition 600 years ago." Nevertheless, several of the greatest recent
Welsh language
Welsh ( or ) is a Celtic language of the Brittonic subgroup that is native to the Welsh people. Welsh is spoken natively in Wales, by some in England, and in Y Wladfa (the Welsh colony in Chubut Province, Argentina). Historically, it has ...
poets have also written sonnets, including
Welsh nationalist
Welsh nationalism ( cy, Cenedlaetholdeb Cymreig) emphasises and celebrates the distinctiveness of Welsh culture and Wales as a nation or country. Welsh nationalism may also include calls for further autonomy or self determination which includes ...
and
Traditionalist Catholic
Traditionalist Catholicism is the set of beliefs, practices, customs, traditions, liturgical forms, devotions, and presentations of Catholic teaching that existed in the Catholic Church before the liberal reforms of the Second Vatican Council ( ...
poet
Saunders Lewis
Saunders Lewis (born John Saunders Lewis) (15 October 1893 – 1 September 1985) was a Welsh politician, poet, dramatist, Medievalist, and literary critic. He was a prominent Welsh nationalist, supporter of Welsh independence and was a co-founde ...
Immanuel the Roman
Immanuel ben Solomon ben Jekuthiel of Rome (Immanuel of Rome, Immanuel Romano, Manoello Giudeo) (1261 in Rome – ca. 1335 in Fermo, Italy) was a Jewish poet and author who lived in present-day Italy and composed works in Hebrew and Italian. Imman ...
around the year 1300 and less than a century after the advent of the Italian sonnet. 38 sonnets are included in his
maqama
''Maqāmah'' (مقامة, pl. ''maqāmāt'', مقامات, literally "assemblies") are an (originally) Arabic prosimetric literary genre which alternates the Arabic rhymed prose known as '' Saj‘'' with intervals of poetry in which rhetorical ...
collection ''Mahberot Immanuel'' that combine elements of both the quantitative metre traditional to Hebrew and Arabic verse and Italian syllabic metre.
After Immanuel, the next wave of Italo-Hebrew sonnetry arrived in the 16th century, authored by Yosef Tzarfati (Giuseppe Gallo) and Moshe ben Yoav, each poet composing around five sonnets. In total, over eighty Hebrew-language sonnets from the 16th century are extant, composed in locations as varied as
Amsterdam
Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the capital and most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population of 907,976 within the city proper, 1,558,755 in the urban ar ...
Turkey
Turkey ( tr, Türkiye ), officially the Republic of Türkiye ( tr, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, links=no ), is a transcontinental country located mainly on the Anatolian Peninsula in Western Asia, with a small portion on the Balkan Peninsula in ...
.
Indian languages
In the Indian subcontinent, sonnets have been written in the Assamese,
Bengali
Bengali or Bengalee, or Bengalese may refer to:
*something of, from, or related to Bengal, a large region in South Asia
* Bengalis, an ethnic and linguistic group of the region
* Bengali language, the language they speak
** Bengali alphabet, the w ...
,
Dogri
Dogri ( Name Dogra Akkhar: ; Devanagari: डोगरी; Nastaliq: ; ) is an Indo-Aryan language primarily spoken in the Jammu region of Jammu and Kashmir, India, with smaller groups of speakers in adjoining regions of western Himachal Prad ...
, English,
Gujarati
Gujarati may refer to:
* something of, from, or related to Gujarat, a state of India
* Gujarati people, the major ethnic group of Gujarat
* Gujarati language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by them
* Gujarati languages, the Western Indo-Aryan sub ...
,
Hindi
Hindi ( Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been ...
,
Kannada
Kannada (; ಕನ್ನಡ, ), originally romanised Canarese, is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by the people of Karnataka in southwestern India, with minorities in all neighbouring states. It has around 47 million native s ...
Malayalam
Malayalam (; , ) is a Dravidian languages, Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry (union territory), Puducherry (Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of 2 ...
poets, also influenced by English and other European poets, took to introducing the sonnet into
Urdu poetry
Urdu poetry ( ur, ) is a tradition of poetry and has many different forms. Today, it is an important part of the cultures of South Asia. According to Naseer Turabi there are five major poets of Urdu which are Mir Taqi Mir (d.1810), Mirza Ghali ...
rather late. Azmatullah Khan (1887–1923) is believed to have introduced this format to
Urdu literature
Urdu literature ( ur, , ) is literature in the Urdu language. While it tends to be dominated by poetry, especially the verse forms of the ''ghazal '' غزل and '' nazm '' نظم, it has expanded into other styles of writing, including that of ...
in the very early part of the 20th century. The other renowned Urdu poets who wrote sonnets were Akhtar Junagarhi,
Akhtar Sheerani
Akhtar Shirani (born Muhammad Dawood Khan; 4 May 1905 – 9 September 1948; also spelled Sheerani or Sherani), was an Urdu poet. He is considered to be one of the leading romantic poets of Urdu language.
Early life and career
Akhtar Shairan ...
* I. Bell, et al. ''A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets''. Blackwell Publishing, 2006. .
*
* Burt, Stephen and Mikics, David. ''The Art of the Sonnet'', The Belknap Press, 2010. .
* T. W. H. Crosland. ''The English Sonnet''. Hesperides Press, 2006. .
* J. Fuller. ''The Oxford Book of Sonnets''.
Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...
, 2002. .
* J. Fuller. ''The Sonnet.'' (The Critical Idiom: #26). Methuen & Co., 1972. .
* U. Hennigfeld. ''Der ruinierte Körper: Petrarkistische Sonette in transkultureller Perspektive''. Königshausen & Neumann, 2008. .
* J. Hollander. ''Sonnets: From Dante to the Present''. Everyman's Library, 2001. .
* P. Levin. ''The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English''. Penguin, 2001. .
* J. Phelan. ''The Nineteenth Century Sonnet''.
Palgrave Macmillan
Palgrave Macmillan is a British academic and trade publishing company headquartered in the London Borough of Camden. Its programme includes textbooks, journals, monographs, professional and reference works in print and online. It maintains off ...
, 2005. .
* S. Regan. ''The Sonnet''. Oxford University Press, 2006. .
* H. Robbins. ''Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition''. University of Georgia Press, 2020. .
* M. R. G. Spiller. ''The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction''. Routledge, 1992. .
* M. R. G. Spiller. ''The Sonnet Sequence: A Study of Its Strategies''. Twayne Pub., 1997. .
Poets.org
The Academy of American Poets is a national, member-supported organization that promotes poets and the art of poetry. The nonprofit organization was incorporated in the state of New York in 1934. It fosters the readership of poetry through outreach ...