Sonnet
A sonnet is a fixed poetic form with a structure traditionally consisting of fourteen lines adhering to a set rhyming scheme. The term derives from the Italian word sonetto. 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.
Romance languages
Sicilian
is credited with the sonnet's invention at the Court of Frederick II in the Sicilian city of Palermo. The Sicilian School of poets who surrounded Lentini then spread the form to the mainland. Those earliest sonnets no longer survive in the original Sicilian language, however, but only after being translated into Tuscan dialect. The form consisted of a pair of quatrains followed by a pair of tercets with the symmetrical rhyme scheme, where the sense is carried forward in a new direction after the midway break.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. 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 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 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", 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 hemistiches 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.
Italian
rediscovered the sonnet form and brought it to Tuscany, where he adapted it to Tuscan dialect when he founded the Siculo-Tuscan, or Guittonian school of poetry. He wrote almost 250 sonnets. Among the host of other Italian poets that followed, the sonnets of Dante Alighieri and Guido Cavalcanti stand out, but later the most famous and widely influential was Petrarch.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 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 pattern became the standard for Italian sonnets. For the sestet, there were two different possibilities: and. In time, other variants on this rhyming scheme were introduced, such as or. Petrarch typically used an pattern for the octave, followed by either or 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, 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. Most of the sonnets there are Petrarchan. Chapter VII gives the sonnet "O voi che per la via", with two sestets and two quatrains, and Ch. VIII, "Morte villana", with two sestets and two quatrains. 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 and Michelangelo, for example, and the astronomer Galileo. The academician Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni 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 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 is by Paolo Lanfranchi da Pistoia and confidently dated to 1284. This employs the rhyme scheme 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 was written by Pere Torroella. 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" towards the middle of the 15th century. Since the Castilian language 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. 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 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, and when writing of love were based on the neoplatonic ideal championed in The Book of the Courtier 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". 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 conceits, 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, which occupies a pivotal position in literary history. At its first appearance in his 1617 comedy La niña de Plata, 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, 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 by the Florentine poet Pieraccio Tedaldi. 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. 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 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. 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 and Los éxtasis de la montaña, whose recognisably authentic pastoral scenes went on to serve as example for César 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's Mascarilla y trébol, a section of unrhymed poems using many of the traditional versification structures of the form are presented under the title "antisonnets".