What’s a Sonnet?
by Mark Raymond
Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Collected Poems includes 177 pages of distinct sonnets, with a few more appearing as parts of other sequences. Such an output ranks her high on the all-time leaderboard, ahead of Shakespeare and trailing Petrarch, but no one’s catching Wordsworth’s 500+. All can agree, though, that Millay was characteristically adept at the sonnet form, those demanding fourteen lines which so test the poet’s ability to make rhyme and meter click while still writing verse that can memorably touch the mind and the heart. But what are we looking at when we look at a sonnet? What’s its genealogy, where does it come from? What makes a sonnet a sonnet, and why are they such a thing?
Without having to squint too much, we can see the sonnet as the first modern verse form. Other modes and genres that still carry weight in the poetic tradition, like the ode or elegy or epic, all have a classical pedigree in Greek and Latin, their origin stories ancient history, but the sonnet, rising out of the end of the Middle Ages, marks something new, something fresh, a signal of early modernity, carried along with the Renaissance from Italy across Europe.
It's an invented form, and we know who invented it, Giacomo da Lentini, a notary or scribe (think official government “secretary”) in the thirteenth-century Sicilian court of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Thirteenth-century Sicily was a cosmopolitan place, and Giacomo’s poetry certainly drew on a confluence of traditions and models circulating around the Mediterranean world, elements of Sicilian folksongs and strands of Arabic poetry all contributing to the mix. But once the form was fixed in a set fourteen-line pattern, octave followed by sestet, with a volta or “turn” of thought between them, the sonnet was ready to go, and the mode just clicked, moving from Sicilian to other Italian dialects and then throughout the languages of early Modern Europe.
The term “sonnet” has been traditionally taken to mean a “little song,” but the fact that a more precise etymology would be a “small sound” has led some to speculate that the sonnet’s origins mark a turn from poetry intended primarily to be heard to a poetry meant to be read. The nineteenth century liked to imagine a troubadour type in colorful tights performing sonnets along with a lute, but sonnets from the start seemed to circulate more as written texts. They’re quieter, more reflective pieces, almost secret and somewhat hushed, designed for silent reading. And as such they prefigure the modern mind and its habits of subjectivity, an individualized turning of thought upon itself.
But the sonnet’s latent modernity first reflected a discarded image out of the Middle Ages. Because of its courtly provenance, the social world of the early sonnet negotiated the complex ideals of courtly love, in which private passions were refracted through chivalric codes of behavior, the object of desire ultimately unattainable (this unattainability often reconfigured the speaker’s relationship to the powers that be—the aristocracy and the church). Sonnets leave Italy basically as love poems yet composed not to be read by the love object but to be shared with other men. They don’t win the heart of the other, at least in the early days of sonneteering; they display instead the intricate modulations of the speaker’s own heart in negotiating their desires in coded cultural terms.
Across the channel in England, when Chaucer “translates” Petrarch’s Sonnet 88 as a song in his poem Troilus and Criseyda ("If no love is, O god, what fele I so?"), he doesn’t make it a sonnet. For the Middle English poet Chaucer, writing in the waning Middle Ages, the sonnet wasn’t a thing, its pattern foreign to the language, its rhyme scheme just noise, conveying no signal. Jump ahead a century or so into the Early Modern Tudor period, and sonnets were all the rage, especially so in their Elizabethan heyday. Everyone, it seems, had to be seen to write them, at least among the poets that make up the canon (and many others now forgot). And, like Petrarch in the fourteenth century, no one could write just one. The trend was to compose a sequence, sonnet after sonnet, still to a great extent “love poems,” but with their courtly conventions flexed to accommodate a widening sphere of desires and addressees. These are still heavily coded poems, both in the way they draw on a set of established Petrarchan conceits like a literary playbook and by following a commonplace of gamesmanship and camouflage—identities are often obscured, cyphers in a way: think of Sir Philip Sydney’s Astrophel and Stella (star-lover and star) or Shakespeare’s own mysterious “fair youth” to whom the bulk of his sonnets are addressed.
One thing to keep in mind, now that we’re out of Italy and the days of Giacomo da Lentini and Petrarch: the printing press. Authorship was shifting in the Early Modern period. An emerging market for printed books created space for writers outside the traditional economies of power (The King and the Church). So, early in the Tudor period we see sonneteers who are mostly courtier types, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, politician poets. By the age of Elizabeth I, a guy like Shakespeare could get in on the action. While poets weren’t necessarily profiting directly from the sale of printed books (patronage still paid), literary ideas and literary renown got circulated a little more freely (the momentum of this, in fits and starts, ultimately gets us to the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment’s public sphere).
As I said, though, sonnets, as harbingers of the modern mind, tended to be circulated privately at first, among a select coterie, balancing their intimacies with literary convention and codes. This is true of Shakespeare’s sonnets. In the late 1500s, we hear whispers about “his sugared sonnets among his private friends.” By the time the collection Shakespeare’s Sonnets ended up in print, though, we’re into the Jacobean Stuart period, Shakespeare’s great tragedies, comedies, and histories had already been composed, all that were left were the late so-called romances, and the Elizabethan frenzy for sonnet writing had cooled. Oddly, the publication of Shakespeare’s sonnets didn’t move the needle in the early 1600s. The contours of the form were already beginning to shift. A century and a half later, when full-fledged Bardolatry ramped up in the eighteenth century (like the Stratford-upon-Avon Shakespeare Jubilee), interest in the sonnets and all things Shakespeare revived (the living line of dead poets’ birthplace restoration starts here as well).
Seventeenth-century sonnets, like those by Milton and Donne, further expanded the topics a sonneteer could address. Donne, for example, had his randy man-about-town persona in his younger days as a coterie poet (collected after his death as Songs and Sonets—a grouping full of erotic wit but no actual sonnets), but his landmark Holy Sonnets from his Christ-haunted later years repositioned sonnet conventions along deeply introspective and heavily religious terms (the Holy Sonnets aren’t really love poems anymore, although the Metaphysicals could paradoxically eroticize anything—that Millay’s candle could burn both ways owes something to Donne’s “tapers” that at their “own cost die”).
Speaking of Shakespeare’s sonnets (and we’re never not talking about Shakespeare when we talk about sonnets), it’s time to address what’s legit. In the sonnet tradition, one could at one time speak of the “legitimate” and the “illegitimate” sonnet. The truer, more authentic form was the Italian, the one invented by Giacomo and made famous by Petrarch. Everything else was illegit, like the English sonnet, associated with Shakespeare (he wasn’t the first to employ the version, he’s just Shakespeare). Both variants display fourteen lines in a set rhyme scheme, with a turn (volta) after 8 lines (the octave) leading to the 6-line conclusion (the sestet) where the rhyme endings change and the poem’s focus in some way shifts. The actual rhyming patterns show some variability, but since inflected Romance-language Italian vocabulary is rich in rhymes, a top-notch Petrarchan sonnet can get away with as few as four end-rhyme sounds: ABBAABBACDCCDC. Those ABBA’s effect a rima baciata in Italian, a kissing rhyme. This is all harder to do in English’s handicapped Germanic, so the Tudor hack was to get to your fourteen lines using three quatrains and a couplet, a workaround cheat that Shakespeare picked up on some Early Modern message board among his private friends. With this strategy you could get away with a rhyme scheme of ABABCDCDEFEFGG and still have a sonnet. Is it legit? Talk of sonnet legitimacy sidesteps the fact that the sonneteer’s tricks and power-ups involve not just the skillful manipulation of the poem’s phonetic elements, rhyme and meter: the poem’s got to make sense. The English-Shakespearean mode still observes a pattern of meaning that flirts with a pattern of sound. The volta-turn might be more obviously enforced in the legitimate Italian, where the rhyme pattern levels up, but Shakespeare’s sonnets also show a decided shift in their argument between the first eight lines (two quatrains) and the concluding six (quatrain 3 and closing couplet). That final couplet effects an additional twist at the end, sealing off the poem with an echoing emphasis like a goodnight kiss.
Some readers see in the sonnet’s octave/sestet 8/6 design a harmonic echo of the golden ratio, that aesthetically pleasing proportion in architecture and art (although 8/5 would be a closer approximation). Others feel the precipitousness of the pattern’s asymmetry, its top-heaviness, which almost pulls the chair on the reader, like an over-assertive dance partner or the misstep of a tipsy courter: things seem to start turning towards a Fibonacci spiral (chiming that golden ratio), and then the poem ends, competing/contributing patterns of sound and sense coinciding with a satisfying/unsatisfied finish, leaving you a bit dizzy. The sonnet experience hits like the bed-spins after a one-night stand (aesthetically speaking): you’re swept off your feet but hate yourself for it, that fleeting intoxication so addictive you crave it all the more despite knowing you better make your next AA and SLAA meetings. All of this is coded into the tropes of Petrarchan love melancholy and admits to the compulsive habits of sonneteering, always a codependent partnership with a head-spinning mistress muse.
English poetics defaults to iambic pentameter—not just for the sonnet, but in blank verse and the heroic couplet. We do other meters, but, since Chaucer, the bulk of the English poetic wordcount has been da-Dum, da-Dum, da-Dum, da-Dum, da-Dum. Most of the poetry in Shakespeare’s plays, in Spenser, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth—really, any longform or epic-scale poem in English after Beowulf uses predominantly iambic pentameter. Shorter lyrics, like songs, generally employ shorter lines and often other stress patterns, the better to trill and trip. That the sonnet, a shorter type of poem, chooses to run with ten-syllable lines points again to the fact no one’s pulling out a lute to sing you a sonnet. Short but weighty, the working out of thought in a sonnet is exhausted by the meter and the rhyme, the pattern can’t be taken lightly, and neither can the development of thought. Sonnets enforce a seriousness that says, “Read me: I’ve got a point to make.”
What happens to sonnets after the seventeenth century is basically the volta in the form’s own tradition. The game’s paused in the Neoclassical Augustan age. The Enlightenment’s increasing candlepower was brightening the corners (whale oil provided the best lamplight, the midnight oil of choice). In literature, the models are classical, harmoniously balanced, and governed by prescriptive rules and laws that assert the early eighteenth century’s sense of its own modernity, human-centered and empiricist: man (and, mostly, these thinkers were men) can look to the globe and its history and understand the order of things according to patterns now seen as rational and “correct,” sweeping away the murk of superstition and all that medieval allegory and anagogy. Being thoroughly modern, what worked for writers a few generations before now appeared impossibly crabbed and old-fashioned, like sporting an oversized ruff collar when everyone’s wearing a powdered wig. No one (well, hardly anyone) was writing sonnets, the mode seemingly oriented towards the past and not the future (we’re in the period of progress-minded Whig History). So, Shakespeare gets feted as the beloved national bard, but his plays are critiqued for not obeying the classical unities of time, place, and action (based on Aristotle but ballyhooed by Corneille), his style too wildly “natural’ and inventive, uncultivated, more forest than garden. Sonnets become artifacts.
The turn against the sonnet was not permanent. One the one hand, sonnets got carried along by the burgeoning Shakespeare industry. Keep in mind that, in addition to putting up busts and spiffing up the birthplace, the elevation of the Bard established his works as approved and edifying for the growing literate and aspirational middle class, supplanting the classical poets in terms of cultural capital on bookshelves for those with little Latin and less Greek. In the coming Victorian period, especially in America, Shakespeare societies sprang up, usually women-only clubs, with a mission to learn about his works while highlighting their moral lessons—Camden had one and Rockland’s is still going. Millay’s poetic youth certainly drew on this valuation of Shakespeare’s poetry, from the age when women had to stake out their own unchaperoned third spaces in the public sphere to claim cultural capital, like tearooms, lady’s ordinaries, and ice-cream saloons. Shakespeare’s sonnets become part of this enterprise. Given the general Victorian ideal of a woman as the “angel of the house,” one wonders how closely they read them—perhaps not with the same eye as Oscar Wilde, but smart readers can always queer the text even under the halo of expurgating morals. We get the word bowdlerize from Thomas Bowdler’s Family Shakespeare.
Shakespeare’s boosted status above his Elizabethan cohort (pretty much top shelf of the canon in fact) might give his sonnets cred in the parlor but doesn’t in itself directly translate to folks writing sonnets of their own. The long eighteenth century marked a long pause in sonnet writing. Turns out their comeback has a lot to do with shifts in authorship as well as readership. Heading towards the end of the eighteenth century, the age of reason makes space in the public sphere for a mini age of sensibility and feeling, opening onto the intensity that would be Romanticism. Marginalized topics that had been belittled (childhood, nature, the domestic, the folktale, the Gothic, and all things ruined and Medievalesque—where does Romanticism get its name but by reviving the spirit of the age of romances) are given voice. Orphaned at the doorstep of Romanticism, the sonnet form is primed for rehabilitation, ready to be taken up by these new writers of feeling and given a fresh start. The sonnet, then, long basically abandoned as a genre for new expression, offers itself as a gateway or starter home for newly empowered voices. It has the good bones and the cultural capital of literary history and canon-branded authorial associations: it’s just sat dormant for a while, unused, a bit motheaten and cranky. It’s like Womanhouse in 1970s L.A., where Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro took over a derelict Victorian mansion as a space for a displaced feminist student art collective to stage an ongoing creative installation.
With sonnets, the underlying feminist intent is easier to see in hindsight. What’s clear at the time is that women’s voices tended to dominate the initial wave of new sonnet writing at the end of the 1700s and the advent of Romanticism. Of course, the big boys soon got in on the trend and started laying their own claims to the sonnet’s scanty plot of ground. Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, and all the top dog Romantics, especially Wordsworth, wrote famous sonnets (and sometimes lots of sonnets), but writers like Charlotte Smith, Anna Seward, and Mary Robinson got there first. And with Romanticism, the topics a sonnet can consider are loosened even further from the creaky archetypes of courtly love, the self getting much more agency in aestheticizing its desires.
Blatant Petrarchan love-melancholy tropes are no longer de rigueur, but some elements of their code-switching remain deeply embedded in the pattern’s inward-and-outward emotional structure. It’s Romanticism. There might be a nightingale. The interior world of the mind and the outer world of nature and history and stuff are now hinged by a new order of things given life through the subjectivity of human consciousness. What used to be humors or demons is now psychology. Romanticism turns out to be Modern poetry, and when Mary Oliver looks at starlings in winter or Robert Lowell smells a skunk or Rilke watches a panther pace behind the bars of a cage, they’re doing what Charlotte Smith was doing in her sonnet to the nightingale (a position of the self to everything not the self that the sonnet form itself has always been preparing for).
Sometimes it seems like a poem needs to reach a minimum threshold, a critical mass of sonnet traits and associations, before readers are compelled to talk about it in sonnet terms—but there’s nothing scientific about it. Sonnets don’t just pop off like atom bombs if you stuff enough sonnet-able material into the right-sized space. What allows us to see a sonnet involves the event-horizon of our own expectations, a shifting, socially constructed paradigm. If a poet calls something a sonnet, we have to deal with it. But what do we do with those poems that aren’t labeled sonnets yet clearly share some sonnet DNA? Are they imperfect sonnets, incomplete sonnets, semi-sonnets, indirect sonnets, transgressive sonnets, or something else, something that leans on the sonnet tradition or borrows from it but resists being contained or constrained by it? Not marking the poem a sonnet makes it a more heterotopic thing, drawing on an edgy fluidity of the form, ambiguous about which boxes to check—a lot like how the Modernists picked up the imagistic ambiguity of the Metaphysical Poets’ language of paradox (Eliot called it the “objective correlative,” but it’s nothing more than Charlotte Smith’s nightingale), and one might say that this is where the so-called American sonnet gets its vital energy. It’s a meta-turn on the social constructed-ness of all poetic forms, a modern invention reinventing itself.
For Further Reading on the Sonnet
Booth, Stephen. Shakespeare's Sonnets, Yale University Press, 2000.
Burt, Stephanie, and David Mikics. The Art of the Sonnet. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010.
Cousins, A. D., and Peter Howarth, editors. The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Feldman, Paula R., and Daniel Robinson. A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival 1750-1850. Oxford University Press, 2002.
Hirsch, Edward, and Eavan Boland. The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology. Norton, 2008.
Levin, Phillis, editor. The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English. Penguin Books, 2001.
Malech, Dora, and Laura T. Smith, editors. The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays, University of Iowa Press, 2022.
Millay, Edna St. Vincent. Collected Poems. Harper & Row, 1956.
Oppenheimer, Paul. The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self, Consciousness, and the Invention of the Sonnet. Oxford University Press, 1989.
Mark Raymond is the author of “The Romantic Sonnet Revival: Opening the Sonnet’s Crypt.” Literature Compass, vol. 4, no. 3, 2007, pp. 721–36.
