Over the centuries, all of Europe started to write sonnets - and, in the English speaking world, after Shakespeare, some of the greatest sonnet-writers are to be found in the Romantic period at the turn of the nineteenth century (these include names like John Keats, William Wordsworth, and Percy Bysshe Shelley). And, from this point, people in England and France began to write sonnets too. These include Petrarch - about whom you'll hear much more - Dante, and Guido Cavalcanti.ĭue to these poets' contemporary fame and prolific work, the sonnet became with them recognisable as it is today. Developed in Sicily by a bloke called Giacomo da Lentini in the thirteenth century, this little poetic form (whose conventions had not yet been formalised) inspired the greatest poets of the Italian Renaissance.
The sonnet is originally an Italian invention - and the word sonnet itself is derived from the Italian word “sonetto,” which means a “little song” or sound. What is super-important to remember in the study of literature is that poetic conventions are determined by history - meaning that you need to know the history of poetic forms if you are really going to understand what the poets are doing. These conventions are what make a sonnet a sonnet (and don't panic, as we outline these below). This means that the word refers to a range of different poems that share certain conventions of length, structure, style, and themes. McClatchy's 'My Mammogram' make similar blends of the two definitions, as does Peter Dale's 'Window', which further adapts the form by moving the second rhyme in each pair a syllable or two back into the line, muting the music of it gently.īilly Collins' 'Sonnet' is a poem that insists it is a sonnet, while it tries to discard some - but not all - of the rules that have traditionally defined a sonnet.For those of you who have never before set foot into the world of literature, let's start from the very basics. Brendan Kennelly's 'The Happy Grass' and J.D. Mimi Khalvati's 'Overblown Roses' begins with a Shakespearean scheme for its opening eight lines, then performs a volta by turning from the flower itself to what it says about mortality in a Petrarchan sestet. Kit Wright's 'Sonnet for Dick' is in the Shakespearean scheme, but once the grief is admitted at the end of the first four lines, the following sentences overflow the shifts in the rhyme scheme, as grief does into life. This means that calling a poem a sonnet is not necessarily to define it strictly, but to say that it stands in relation to the long tradition of sonnets.
There are also innumerable individual exceptions to the form - a poet may refer to a poem as a sonnet because it meets some of the descriptions above, or even just because s/he says so. The fact that these are still referred to as a curtal and a Meredithian sonnet, however, shows that they are not (yet?) considered sonnets per se.
The main exceptions are the curtal sonnet, a form invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins that roughly maintains the 8:6 ratio over a ten-and-a-half line poem, and the Meredithian sonnet of 16 lines. In Shakespeare's usage, the three quatrains tend to make an argument in three stages, which the couplet will sum up or comment on. The Shakespearean sonnet breaks into three quatrains, followed by a couplet, rhymed abab cdcd efef gg - as the name suggests, this is the form Shakespeare used for his sonnets, although he did not invent it. Often, at the point where the eight-line section, known as the octave, turns into the six-line section, or sestet, there is a volta, from the Italian for 'turn' - this is a shift in the poem's tone, subject or logic that gains power from (or demands?) the matching shift in its structure. The distribution of these rhymes can vary, including cdcede, cdecde, cdedce, or even cdcdcd. One of these schemes is known as the Petrarchan, after the Italian poet Petrarch it consists of a group of eight lines, rhymed abbaabba, followed by a group of six lines with different rhymes. A sonnet, in English poetry, is a poem of fourteen lines, usually in iambic pentameter, that has one of two regular rhyme schemes - although there are a couple of exceptions, and years of experimentation that have loosened this definition.
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