Sonnet

Sonnet, lyric poem of 14 lines with a formal rhyme scheme, expressing different aspects of a single thought, mood, or feeling, resolved or summed up in the last lines of the poem. Originally short poems accompanied by mandolin or lute music, sonnets are generally composed in the standard metre of the language in which they were written—iambic pentameter in English, the Alexandrine in French, for example (see Versification).

The two main forms of the sonnet are the Petrarchan, or Italian, and the English, or Shakespearean. The former probably developed from the stanza form of the canzone or from Italian folk song. The earliest known Italian sonneteer was Guittone d'Arezzo. The form reached its peak with the Italian poet Petrarch, whose Canzoniere (c. 1327) includes 317 sonnets addressed to his beloved Laura. Among Petrarch's followers, who established the sonnet tradition in their countries, were his countryman Torquato Tasso; Luis de Camões in Portugal; and Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay, and other members of the French group known as the Pléiade. The sonnet form was also introduced into the literature of the Slavic countries. Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, are credited with introducing the sonnet into England with translations of Italian sonnets as well as with sonnets of their own.

The Petrarchan sonnet consists of an octave, or eight-line stanza, and a sestet, or six-line stanza. The octave has two quatrains, rhyming a b b a, a b b a; the first quatrain presents the theme, the second develops it. The sestet is built on two or three different rhymes, arranged either c d e c d e, or c d c d c d, or c d e d c e; the first three lines exemplify or reflect on the theme, and the last three lines bring the whole poem to a unified close. Among great examples of the Petrarchan sonnet in the English language are Sir Philip Sidney's sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella (1591), which established the form in England. There, in the Elizabethan age, it reached the peak of its popularity.

The English sonnet, exemplified by the work of Shakespeare or Edmund Spenser's Amoretti (1595), developed as an adaptation to a language less rich in rhymes than Italian. This form differs from the Petrarchan in being divided into three quatrains, each rhymed differently, with a final, independently rhymed couplet that makes an effective, unifying climax to the whole. The rhyme scheme is a b a b, c d c d, e f e f, g g.

In 17th-century England the sonnet tradition continued, with an expansion of the type of subject matter treated. Whereas the 16th-century sonnet dealt primarily with love, John Donne wrote a series of Holy Sonnets; and the sonnets of John Milton, written in both English and Italian, concern politics, religion, and personal matters. Milton's sonnets, based on the Petrarchan form, differ slightly in not having a break in the sense between octave and sestet. This results in an even greater cohesiveness of structure.

After Milton, however, the popularity of the sonnet form in English declined somewhat until the end of the 18th century when the Romantic poets revitalized it. William Wordsworth is regarded as the finest sonnet writer of the period, although outstanding sonnets were also written by his contemporaries Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. During the Victorian period Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), and Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote the sonnet sequence The House of Life (1881). Other important sonneteers include Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Christina Georgina Rossetti, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The work of Hopkins is marked by radical variations in the traditional sonnet form; for example, his 11-line sonnet “Pied Beauty” uses sprung rhythm and begins with a sestet, concluding with a quatrain and a very short final line.

The sonnet form has proved adaptable to 20th-century themes and diction. The Austro-German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote what is considered one of the greatest of modern sonnet sequences, Sonnets to Orpheus (1923; trans. 1936). Edwin Arlington Robinson, Elinor Wylie, and Edna St Vincent Millay are noted 20th-century American sonneteers. The Anglo-American W. H. Auden wrote the distinguished sequence Sonnets from China (1936-1938), as well as numerous individual sonnets.