Sonnet
The term sonnet refers to a fixed verse poetic form, traditionally consisting of fourteen lines adhering to a set rhyming scheme.
"[6] 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 muwashshah and zajal, as well as the qasida.
[10] At a slightly earlier date, Dante had published his La Vita Nuova, a narrative commentary in which appear sonnets and other lyrical forms centred on the poet's love for Beatrice.
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.
The poems of both followed the Petrarchan model, employed the hitherto unfamiliar hendecasyllable, and when writing of love were based on the neoplatonic ideal championed in The Book of the Courtier (Il Cortegiano) that Boscán had also translated.
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.
[24] 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.
In the 19th century, for example, there were two poets who wrote memorable sonnets dedicated to Mexican landscapes, Joaquín Acadio Pagaza y Ordóñez in the torrid zone to the south and Manuel José Othón in the desolate north.
Thus, in the Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni'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".
[36] 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.
[40] In the aftermath of the Wars of Religion, 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.
Drawing upon the Gospels, Greek and Roman mythology, and the Fathers of the Church, La Ceppède's poetry was praised by Saint Francis de Sales for transforming "the Pagan Muses into Christian ones".
[50] 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, when it was widely used.
This led to Mary Robinson'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.
From his series on the River Duddon[65] sprang reflections on any number of regional natural features; his travel tour effusions, though not always confined to sonnet form,[66] found many imitators.
Essentially the stanza is made up of four quatrains of enclosed rhyme, 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".
[79] 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", equally based on a fragment of an ancient Greek author.
As part of his attempted renewal of poetic prosody, Gerard Manley Hopkins had applied his experimental sprung rhythm 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.
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.
[86] At the same time, Geoffrey Hill'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.
In the opinion of Hughes, the emergence of truly individual writing based on folk genres and experience was hindered by the imposition of genteel "white" verse forms irrelevant to them.
[114] From 1969 Robert Lowell too began publishing a less radical deconstruction of the form in his series of five collections of blank verse sonnets, including his Pulitzer Prize volume The Dolphin (1973).
[123] Patrick Bridgwater, writing in 1985, called the work "without question the best single collection produced by a German war poet in 1914–18," but adds that it "is to this day virtually unknown even in Germany.
[126] 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.
In the 20th century Vítězslav Nezval wrote the cycle 100 sonetů zachránkyni věčného studenta Roberta Davida (One Hundred Sonnets for the Woman who Rescued Perpetual Student Robert David).
[156] In the 18th century, after the westernizing reforms of Peter the Great, Russian poets (among others Alexander Sumarokov and Mikhail Kheraskov) began to experiment with sonnets, but the form was soon overtaken in popularity by the more flexible Onegin stanza.
This changed, however, during the Gaelic revival when Dublin-born Liam Gógan (1891–1979) was dismissed from his post in the National Museum of Ireland and imprisoned at Frongoch internment camp following the Easter Rising.
[163] In 2009, poet Muiris Sionóid published a complete translation of William Shakespeare's 154 sonnets into Irish under the title Rotha Mór an Ghrá ("The Great Wheel of Love").
[165] According to Jan Morris, "When Welsh poets speak of Free Verse, they mean forms like the sonnet or the ode, which obey the same rules as English poesy.
[168] In the Indian subcontinent, sonnets have been written in the Assamese, Bengali, Dogri, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Sindhi and Urdu languages.
