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A sonnet is a fixed poetic form with a structure traditionally consisting of fourteen lines adhering to a set Rhyme scheme. The term derives from the Italian word sonetto (, from the Latin word sonus, ). Originating in 13th-century Sicily, the sonnet was in time taken up in many European-language areas, mainly to express romantic love at first, although eventually any subject was considered acceptable. Many formal variations were also introduced, including abandonment of the quatorzain limit – and even of rhyme altogether in modern times.
Peter Dronke has commented that there was something intrinsic to its flexible form that contributed to the sonnet's survival far beyond its region of origin.Peter Dronke, The Medieval Lyric, Hutchinson University Library, 1968, pp. 151–4. 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.William Baer (2005), Sonnets: 150 Contemporary Sonnets, University of Evansville Press, pp. 153–154.
In contrast, Hassanally Ladha has argued that the Sicilian sonnet's structure and content drew upon Arabic poetry and cannot be explained as the "invention" of the Sicilian School of poets. Ladha notes that "in its Sicilian beginnings, the sonnet evinces literary and epistemological contact with the qasida", Ladha, Hassanaly, "From Bayt to Stanza: Arabic Khayāl and the Advent of Italian Vernacular Poetry": Exemplaria: Vol 32, No 1 (tandfonline.com), p. 17. Retrieved 7 July 2021. 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 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 muwashshah and zajal, as well as the qasida.
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 (two ) that 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 CDC DCD or CDE DCE. 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 unified about a single theme. This is represented by Folgore da San Gimignano's series on the months of the year, Of the months", translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, followed by his sequence on the days of the week. 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. La Vita Nuova (The New Life), A. S. Kline, Poetry in Translation, 2000–02. 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. "Petrarch: The Canzonieri", A. S. Kline, Poetry in Translation, 2002
Widespread as sonnet writing became in Italian society, among practitioners were to be found some better known for other things: the painters Giotto and Michelangelo, for example, and the astronomer Galileo Galilei. The academician Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni lists 661 poets just in the 16th century."Critical History of the Sonnet", Dublin Review 79 (1876), p. 409. 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 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."Richard Chevenix Trench, "The History of the English Sonnet" (London, 1884), p. ix.
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, 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. Their reputation was consolidated by the later 1580 edition of Fernando de Herrera, who was himself accounted "the first major Spanish sonneteer after Garcilaso".Rutherford ed. 2016 During the Baroque period that followed, two notable writers of sonnets headed rival stylistic schools. The culteranismo of Luis de Góngora, 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, was equally self-conscious, deploying wordplay and metaphysical , after which the style was known as conceptismo.
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).Jorge Leon Gusta, "Historia de un poema", 17 August 2021 Later imitations in other languages include one in Italian by Giambattista Marino and another in French by François-Séraphin Régnier-Desmarais, as well as an adaptation of the idea applied to the rondeau by Vincent Voiture. "Sonnets on the Sonnet", The Irish Monthly, Vol. 26, No. 304 (October 1898) (p. 518). 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.David Garrison, "English Translations of Lope de Vega's Soneto de repente", Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 19. 2 (Invierno 1995), pp. 311–325.
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. 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 in the torrid zone to the south and Manuel José Othón in the desolate north. An Anthology of Mexican Poetry (compiled by Octavio Paz), Indiana University, 1958 In South America, too, the sonnet was used to invoke landscape, particularly in the major collections of the Uruguayan Julio Herrera y Reissig, 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 César Vallejo in his evocations of Andean Peru.Gwen Kirkpatrick, The Dissonant Legacy of Modernismo, University of California, 1989, p. 207.
Soon afterwards, the sonnet form was deconstructed as part of the modernist questioning of the past. 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".
The introduction later of a purified sonnet style to Brazilian literature was due to Cláudio Manuel da Costa, who also composed Petrarchan sonnets in Italian during his stay in Europe.Bouterwek 1823, pp. 357–9. 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. Anthologie de la Poésie Ibéro-Américaine, Editions Nagel, 1956, "Introduction", pp. 35–6. Others writing sonnets in that style included the now overlooked Francisca Júlia da Silva Munster (1871–1920)Latin American Women Writers: An Encyclopedia, Routledge, 2014, p. 204. and the Symbolist Afro-Brazilian poet João da Cruz e Sousa.
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 Mythology 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". La Ceppède's sonnets often attack the Calvinist doctrine of a judgmental and unforgiving God by focusing on Christ's passionate love for the human race. 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 in the 19th century. Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve then published his imitation of William Wordsworth'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. A book of French prosody, p. 270. The form was little used, however, until the Parnassianism brought it back into favour, and following them the Symbolist poets. Overseas in Canada, the teenaged Émile Nelligan is particularly noted among the French language poets who wrote sonnets in that style.
During the latter half of the 19th century, there were many deviations from the traditional sonnet form. Charles Baudelaire was responsible for significant variations in rhyme-scheme and line-length in the poems included in Les Fleurs du mal.Killick, Rachel. " Sorcellerie Évocatoire and the Sonnet in Les Fleurs Du Mal", Dalhousie French Studies, vol. 2, Dalhousie University, 1980, pp. 21–39 Among the variations made by others, Théodore de Banville's "Sur une dame blonde" limited itself to a four-syllable line, A book of French prosody, p. 273. while in À une jeune morte Jules de Rességuier (1788–1862) composed a sonnet monosyllabically lined. A book of French prosody, p. 27.
Prosodically, Surrey is more adept at composing in iambic pentameter and his sonnets are written in what has come to be known anachronistically as Shakespearean measure.Thomson 1964, pp. 174–79. 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. It was particularly so in whole series of amatory sequences, beginning with Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella (1591) and continuing over a period of two decades. About four thousand sonnets were composed during this time. The Art of the Sonnet, 2010, p. 12. However, with such a volume, much there that was conventional and repetitious came to be viewed with a sceptical eye. Sir John Davies mocked these in a series of nine "gulling sonnets" Gulling Sonnets by Mr Davyes. and William Shakespeare was also to dismiss some of them in his Sonnet 130, "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.
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.John H. Finley, Jr., "Milton and Horace: A Study of Milton's Sonnets", Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. 48 (1937), pp. 29–73. He also seems to have been the first to introduce an Italian variation of the form, the caudate sonnet, into English in his prolongation of "On the New Forcers of Conscience Under the Long Parliament"."Caudate sonnet", The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan, Princeton University Press, 1993.
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 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".S. T. Coleridge, Poems, London 1796, p.x 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'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.Mary Robinson, Sappho and Phaon: in a series of legitimate sonnets, with thoughts on poetical subjects, London 1796, p.10
At the start of the 19th century, Capel Lofft expressed his sense of the importance of the sonnet's history to the new generation of English poets. In the long preface to his idiosyncratic Laura, or an anthology of sonnets (on the Petrarchan model) and elegiac quatorzains (London 1814), the thesis is developed that beyond the sonnet's Sicilian origin lies the system of musical notation developed by the mediaeval Guido of Arezzo, and before that the musical arrangement of the Greek ode.Lofft 1814, pp.iii-ix The young Milton, he noted, had learned the mature Italian style while travelling in Italy and conversing on equal terms with its writers (as well as writing five sonnets in Italian as well).Lofft 1814, pp. cxli-clv In form, his are modelled on Petrarch's and, dealing as they do with both personal and contemporary issues, are reminiscent in their organisation of the Horatian ode.John H. Finley, Jr., "Milton and Horace: A Study of Milton's Sonnets", Harvard Studies in Classical Philology Vol. 48 (1937), pp. 29-73
Impressed too by Milton's sonnets, Wordsworth described the form 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".Jay Curlin, "Chaos in the Convent's Narrow Room: Milton and the Sonnet", Scholarly Commons, 1993 In that its compression could be adapted to a great variety of themes, he eventually wrote some 523 sonnets which were to exert a powerful stylistic influence throughout the first half of the 19th century.George Sanderlin, "The Influence of Milton and Wordsworth on the Early Victorians", ELH 5.3 (1938), pp.225–251 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.Sanderlin 1938, pp.229–35 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 for 1821 was diagnosing "sonnettomania" as a new sickness akin to "the bite of a rabid animal".Jennifer Ann Wagner, A Moment's Monument: Revisionary Poetics and the Nineteenth-century English Sonnet, Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1996, p.116
Another arm of the propaganda on behalf of the sonnet in Romantic times 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 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 (1845–50), for example, is described as the first depiction of a successful courtship since Elizabethan times. The art of the sonnet, Harvard University Press, 2010, p.18 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".Dorothy Mermin, "The Female Poet and the Embarrassed Reader: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets From the Portuguese", ELH 48.2 (Johns Hopkins University, 1981), p.356
That sequence was followed in 1862 by George Meredith's Modern Love,Google Books, pp.31–82 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, 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".Stephen Regan, "The Victorian Sonnet, from George Meredith to Gerard Manley Hopkins", The Yearbook of English Studies 36.2 (2006), p.23 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, 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", equally based on a fragment of an ancient Greek author. On the other hand, Eugene Lee-Hamilton'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, The Art of the Sonnet, Harvard University 2016, Introduction, p.20 but they illustrate a contemporary urge to make new a form that was fast running out of steam.
The undergraduate W. H. Auden is sometimes credited with dispensing with rhyme altogether in "The Secret Agent".Robert E. Bjork, W. H. Auden's "The Secret Agent", ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 8 November, 2020 He went on to write many conventional sonnets later, including two long sequences during the time of international crisis: "In Time of War" (1939) and "The Quest" (1940), in which "the use of geography and landscape to symbolise spiritual and mental states" owes something to the earlier example of Rilke.R. G. Cox, "The Poetry of W. H. Auden", The Modern Age( Volume 7 of the Pelican Guide to English Literature (1961), pp. 386-7 Sequences by some other poets 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.Julian Scutts, A Defence of Wandering and Poetry (2019), "A critical survey of the linguistic features of Altarwise by Owl-light, pp. 155ff
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.D. M. Black, quoted in Agenda 26.2, Summer 1998, p.49 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. The Waywiser Press, revised edition 2002 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. Seamus Heaney 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 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. The Book of the Sonnet, vol.1 and vol.2, Hathi Trust 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. Representative sonnets by American poets, Hathi Trust
Recent scholarship has recovered many African American sonnets that were not anthologised in standard American poetry volumes. Important nineteenth and early twentieth century writers have included Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen, Sterling A. Brown, and Jamaican-born Claude McKay. Some of their sonnets were personal responses to experience of displacement and racial prejudice. Cullen’s "At the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem" (1927), for example, suggests a parallel between the history of his race and that of the Jewish diaspora. The Art of the Sonnet, pp. 273-76] And McKay's sonnets of 1921 respond defiantly to the deadly Red Summer riots two years before. The Art of the Sonnet, pp. 250-52] There were also several African American women poets who won prizes for volumes that included sonnets, including Margaret Walker (Yale Poetry Series) Gwendolyn Brooks (Pulitzer Prize), Rita Dove (Pulitzer Prize), and Natasha Trethewey (Pulitzer Prize). But there were other writers - like Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka, for example - who, despite publishing some themselves, questioned the appropriateness of sonnets for Black poets. 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.Jordan D. Finkin, Exile as Home: The Cosmopolitan Poetics of Leyb Naydus, Hebrew Union College Press, 2017, p. 56
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. This Man's Army: A War in Fifty-odd Sonnets, University of South Carolina 2008 A series of irregular sonnets that recorded impressions of his military service with the American Expeditionary Force during the First World War, it was scarcely noticed when it first appeared. Yet on its republication in 2008, Dana Gioia asserted in his introduction that Wyeth is the only American poet of the Great War who can stand comparison to British ,Dana Gioia, "The Obscurity of John Allan Wyeth" (2008) a claim later corroborated by Jon Stallworthy in his review of the work.Dana Gioia, John Allan Wyeth: Soldier Poet, St Austin Review, March/April 2020, p.5.
Shortly after the publication of Wyeth's, 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 that invariably ends with a rhyming couplet reminiscent of the Shakespearean sonnet. An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, Greenwood Publishing Group 2001, p.93 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.Jim Moon, "The internal continuity of Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth", in H.P. Lovecraft: Selected Works, Critical Perspectives and Interviews, McFarland, 2018, p.245 Their unmannered style was once compared to Edward Arlington Robinson's,S. T. Joshi's introduction to An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H.P. Lovecraft, Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1991 , p.37 but since then a case has been made for the work as minor poetry of contemporary importance in its own right.Geoffrey Reiter, "'Alone Before Eternity': A Review of H. P. Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth", Christ and Pop Culture, 27 June 2017
In the case of John Berryman, 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, 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.April Bernard, "Berryman's Sonnets", Poetry Foundation
But at this time too began to appear sequences of 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".Berrigan's talk at the Poetry Project Workshop, 27 February 1979 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".Timothy Henry, "Time And Time Again": The Strategy of Simultaneity in Ted Berrigan's The Sonnets", Jacket 40, 2010 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). These he described as having "the eloquence at best of iambic pentameter, and often the structure and climaxes of sonnets". "Robert Lowell 1917–1977", Poetry Foundation
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, Howard Nemerov and Anthony Hecht – continued to write sonnets and eventually became associated with the magazines The Formalist and then Measure. These journals, champions of the New Formalism between the years 1994 and 2017, sponsored the annual Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award.
Canadian poet Seymour Mayne 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.See Ricochet: Word Sonnets / Sonnets d'un mot , by Seymour Mayne, French translation: Sabine Huynh, University of Ottawa Press, 2011.
The sonnet tradition was then continued by August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Paul von Heyse and others, reaching fruition in Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, which has been described as "one of the great modern poems, not to mention a monumental addition to the literature of the sonnet sequence".David Young's introduction to his translation of Sonnets to Orpheus, Wesleyan University, 1987, p.xv 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 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 Grab-Mal (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.Charlie Louth, "Die Sonnette an Orpheus", in Rilke, The Life of the Work, OUP 2020, pp.455–509
Responses to turbulent times form a distinct category among German sonnets. They include Friedrich Rückert's 72 "Sonnets in Armour" ( Geharnischte Sonneten, 1814), stirring up resistance to Napoleonic domination; and sonnets by Emanuel Geibel written during the German revolutions of 1848–1849 and the First Schleswig War.”Critical History of the Sonnet", Dublin Review 79 (1876), p. 418 In the wake of the First World War, Anton Schnack, described by one anthologist as "the only German language poet whose work can be compared with that of Wilfred Owen", published the sonnet sequence, Tier rang gewaltig mit Tier ("Beast Strove Mightily with Beast", 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 in 1914–18," but adds that it "is to this day virtually unknown even in Germany."Bridgwater (1985), The German Poets of the First World War, p. 96.
Following the Second World War, avant-garde poets declared war on all formalism, reacting particularly against the extreme subjectivity and self-aggrandisement of representatives of the 1880s style like Willem Kloos, who had once begun a sonnet "In my deepest being I'm a god". In reaction, Lucebert satirised such writing in the "sonnet" with which his first collection opened:
The first sonnets in Medieval Hebrew poetry were probably composed in Rome by Immanuel the Roman around the year 1300, less than a century after the advent of the Italian sonnet. 38 sonnets are included in his maqama collection Mahberot Immanuel that combine elements of both the quantitative metre traditional to Hebrew and Arabic verse and Italian syllabic metre. Predominantly dealing with love, they were rhymed ABBA ABBA CDE CDE.
Immanuel's work provided a ready model for the second wave of Italo-Hebrew sonnet writers. The first printed edition of Mahberot Immanuel appeared in Brescia in 1492, followed by a second edition published in Constantinople in 1535. The new crop therefore coincided with the adoption of the sonnet in other European literatures at the start of the 16th century and persisted into the Baroque period of the following century, with more than eighty poets taking up the form. Though there was now a shift of focus to religious themes, love poetry was not excluded, particularly in the sonnets of David Okineira of Salonika.Dvora Bregman, The Golden Way The Hebrew Sonnet during The Renaissance and Baroque Periods, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies), Tempe, Arizona, 2006 The Baroque practice of incorporating sonnets along with other verse into plays, as had Shakespeare in England and Lope da Vega in Spain, was also to be found in Moses ben Mordecai Zacuto's Yesod Olam (Foundation of the World, 1642) and in Asirei ha-Tiqva (Prisoners of Hope, 1673), an allegorical play by Joseph de la Vega. A further revival of the Hebrew sonnet followed in the 18th century, associated with Samson Cohen Modon (1679–1727), Moshe Chaim Luzzatto and his cousin, Ephraim Luzzatto (1729–1792), who are regarded as founders of modern Hebrew literature.Dvora Bregman, "The Emergence of the Hebrew Sonnet", Prooftexts, Vol. 11, No. 3 (September 1991), p. 232
That the form persisted into the 20th century was celebrated by Shaul Tchernichovsky in his Maḥberet ha-Sonetot (Berlin 1923), in which appeared a sonnet of his own celebrating its continuity since the time of Immanuel of Rome: "Thou art dear to me, how dear to me, Sonetot, O shir zahav". Bregman 2006, p.1 The same author was responsible for introducing the crown of sonnets into Hebrew poetry.
The first poets to use the form are credited as Dovid Kenigsberg (1891-1942) and Fradl Shtok. The former published Soneten (Lviv 1913) and later his hundred sonnets ( Hundert Soneten, Vienna, 1921). The Congress for Jewish Culture Lexicon Shtok emigrated to the US while young and began publishing poetry soon after her arrival in New York in 1910. The Congress for Jewish Culture Lexicon In reality, earlier sonnets dating from the 1890s were written in the US by Morris Vintshevski (1856-1932); and in Vilnius those written by Leib Naidus, starting from 1910, demonstrated the westward-spreading influence of Symbolist-inspired modernism.Jordan D. Finkin, Exile as Home: The Cosmopolitan Poetics of Leyb Naydus, Hebrew Union College Press, 2017, pp. 55-9 Those poets in Europe who authored entire collections of sonnets include Gershon-Peysekh Vayland (1869–1942), published in Warsaw in 1938 and 1939; The Congress for Jewish Culture Lexicon Yankev Gotlib (1911–1945), published in Kaunas in 1938; The Congress for Jewish Culture Lexicon and the Polish Abraham Nahum Stencl , whose Londoner Sonetn were published after his arrival in London in 1937. The Congress for Jewish Culture Lexicon
Later examples of those writing substantial numbers of sonnets in the US number the scholar N. B. Minkoff, who included a sonnet cycle in Lieder (1924), his first publication after immigrating, The Congress for Jewish Culture Lexicon and Aron Glantz-Leyeles (1899–1968), who published a whole collection of poems in mediaeval forms in 1926. This included "Autumn", a densely rhymed garland of fifteen sonnets. American Yiddish Poetry, Stanford University, 2007, pp. 46-7 In 1932 Yoysef-Leyzer Kalushiner (1893–1968) published a whole book of sonnets in New York. The Congress for Jewish Culture Lexicon He was followed by the little known M. Freed, who had already published a sonnet collection, The Narcissi ("נארציסן", Czernowitz, 1937), in Bukovina before making his way to the US, where he published An evening by the Prut (מ. פרידוויינינגער, New York, 1942).A. V. Zornytskyi, "The Yiddish sonnets of M. Freed" Later collections of sonnets include Sonetn fun toye-voye (Sonnets of chaos, New York, 1957) by Yirmye Hesheles, (1910–2010) The Congress for Jewish Culture Lexicon and Mani Leib's Sonetn (1961), considered the crowning achievement of his work and "one of the last great works of Yiddish poetry".Jordan Finkin, "To organize beauty: the sonnets of Mani Leyb", Studies in American Jewish Literature 34.1, Spring 2015 To these post-war collections may be added Meksike, finf un draysik sonetn (Mexico, 35 sonnets, 1949), which was published in Mexico City after Austridan Oystriak (1911-92) had fled there from Europe in 1940. The Congress for Jewish Culture Lexicon
Yiddish sonnets published in Israel, where the preferred language was Hebrew, were comparatively rare. Samuel Jacob Taubes (1898-1975) had already published religious sonnets in Europe before emigrating to Israel after a wandering literary career. The Congress for Jewish Culture Lexicon Shlomo Roitman (1913-85) began writing in Russia and published sonnet collections after his arrival in Israel. The Congress for Jewish Culture Lexicon
In 1826, Poland's national poet, Adam Mickiewicz, wrote a sonnet sequence known as the Crimean Sonnets, after the Tsar sentenced him to exile in the Crimean Peninsula. Mickiewicz's sonnet sequence focuses heavily on the culture and religion of the Crimean Tatars. The sequence was translated into English by Edna Worthley Underwood.Edna W. Underwood (translator), "Sonnets from the Crimea by Adam Mickiewicz", Paul Elder and Company, San Francisco (1917)
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"). In an article about his translations, Sionóid wrote that Irish poetic forms are completely different from those of other languages and that both the sonnet form and the iambic pentameter line had long been considered "entirely unsuitable" for composing poetry in Irish. In his translations, Soinóid chose to closely reproduce Shakespeare's rhyme scheme and rhythms while rendering into Irish. Sionóid, Muiris, "Aistriú na Soinéad go Gaeilge: Saothar Grá! Translating the Sonnets to Irish: A Labour of Love", shakespeare.org.
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/ref> Azmatullah Khan (1887–1923) is believed to have introduced this format to Urdu literature in the very early part of the 20th century. The other renowned Urdu poets who wrote sonnets were Akhtar Junagarhi, Akhtar Sheerani, Noon Meem Rashid, Mehr Lal Soni Zia Fatehabadi, Salaam Machhalishahari and Wazir Agha.
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