In the last two decades, the volta has become conventionally used as a word for this, stemming supposedly from technique specific mostly to sonnets.
Volta is not, in fact, a term used by many earlier critics[1] when they address the idea of a turn in a poem, and they usually are not discussing the sonnet form.
For those poems for which the swerve, the turn, the sudden change in direction are integral, can we begin to articulate a precise appreciation?
[5] Author and historian Paul Fussell in a book in which he never uses the word 'volta' talks generally of the poetic turn as "indispensable".
[6] He states further that "the turn is the dramatic and climactic center of the poem, the place where the intellectual or emotional method of release first becomes clear and possible.
"[8] Additionally, Levin states that "the arrangement of lines into patterns of sound serves a function we could call architectural, for these various acoustical partitions accentuate the element that gives the sonnet its unique force and character: the volta, the 'turn' that introduces into the poem a possibility for transformation, like a moment of grace".
Poet-critic Ellen Bryant Voigt states, "The sonnet's volta, or 'turn'...has become an inherent expectation for most short lyric poems.
Eliot (in his essay on Andrew Marvell, where he discusses longer poems than sonnets and does not use the term voltà) calls the turn in general "one of the most important means of poetic effect since Homer.
Additionally, he notes, "To engage with the verb 'to veer' is to find ourselves in Latin, French and other so-called foreign waters.
As discussed by Christopher Bakken in "The Ironic Structure", "The ironic structure—with its building up and knocking down, its dreaming and waking—becomes the perfect instrument for a great Romantic ironist like Lord Byron, whose long poem "Don Juan" exemplifies this complicated problem.
One example of a retrospective-prospective turn is I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (Daffodils) by William Wordsworth.
One example of a poem with a descriptive meditating turn is "Tintern Abbey" by William Wordsworth.
"[27] According to poet-critic Eavan Boland, "The original form of the sonnet, the Petrarchan, made a shadow play of eight lines against six.
The sestet does something different: it makes a swift, wonderfully compact turn on the hidden meanings of but and yet and wait for a moment.
[29] Another description of the Shakespearean volta comes from Helen Vendler in her book, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, where the author states, "the couplet—placed not as resolution (which is the function of Q3) but as coda—can then stand in any number of relations (summarizing, ironic, expansive) to the preceding argument.
By discussing how the turn creates movement, power, or surprise within the poem, this in-depth investigation encourages a more complete reading of poetry.
[31] Michael Theune also writes that by recognizing and understanding the turn, poets can revise their poems so they "begin to embody the power, mystery, seductiveness, and grace of great poetry without either becoming unclear and lapsing into disarray or else becoming overly clear by incorporating excessive explanation.
Maureen McLane published a round-up discussion of this event called "Twisting and Turning": "A Divagation Prompted by the Poets Forum Panel of November 8, 2008".
McLane states, "One could, of course, explore poetic turns at multiple levels: morphemic, lexical, phrasal, tropological, conceptual, structural, generic, transmedial.
"[33] In "How We Value Contemporary Poetry: An Empirical Inquiry", Bob Broad and Michael Theune find that some of their study's participants value poems with "a sort of development or shape that moves with control to negotiate the poem's risk, while incorporating surprise and build and turns to arrive at an ending".