Form
The Sonnet
Also Known As Sonetto
Sonnet Forms
A fixed fourteen-line lyric poem form, traditionally in iambic pentameter, that arose in the Sicilian School at the court of Frederick II in the early thirteenth century and was carried into wide European use through Petrarch's Italian love sonnets a century later. Two rhyme-scheme traditions dominate: the Petrarchan (or Italian) sonnet, divided into an eight-line octave and a six-line sestet turning on a volta, or thematic turn, between them; and the Shakespearean (or English) sonnet, structured as three quatrains and a closing couplet, which restates or resolves the poem's argument. Shakespeare's own 154 sonnets are the form's best-known English example, though poets from Petrarch to Elizabeth Barrett Browning to contemporary writers have continued to use and adapt the form.
Facts
Place of Origin StructureFourteen lines adhering to a set rhyme scheme, traditionally in iambic pentameter. 1 Notable ExamplePetrarch's Canzoniere, 366 sonnets chronicling his lifelong love for Laura, written a century after Giacomo da Lentini is credited with inventing the form at the Sicilian court of Frederick II. 1 The Sonnet
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Connections
Associated With
Dolce Stil Novo poets (Guinizelli, Cavalcanti, Dante) composed chiefly in the sonnet.
Parnassianism, Movements Jose-Maria de Heredia's Les Trophees, the school's best-known collection, is a sequence of sonnets.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The House of Life is the school's signature sonnet sequence.
The Petrarchan sonnet is the original form the general Sonnet entry describes.
Held Differently
The Shakespearean Sonnet, Forms A structural variant adapting the Petrarchan original to English's comparative scarcity of rhyme, not a rejection of the sonnet form; developed by Surrey from Wyatt's earlier translations before Shakespeare's own use made the name stick.
Source Poetry Foundation
Form Of Genre
Source The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Influenced
Source The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Open Questions
Source The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Works In This Form
Source Wikipedia: Sonnets to Orpheus
In the Other Atlases
Originated In
Also in Geography Atlas: where this subject originated.
Sources
1. Sonnet (Wikipedia)
WikipediaIntroduction
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.
Etymology section
The term derives from the Italian word sonetto (lit. little song, from the Latin word sonus, lit. sound).
Lead section
A sonnet is a fixed poetic form with a structure traditionally consisting of fourteen lines adhering to a set rhyming scheme.
History section
Petrarch followed in his footsteps later in the next century with the 366 sonnets of the Canzioniere, which chronicle his life-long love for Laura.
Lead paragraph
is a fixed poetic form
Lead paragraph, origin year
Originating in 13th-century Sicily
View the Source 2. Poets.org (Academy of American Poets): Sonnet
Poets.org (Academy of American Poets)Glossary entry, sentence on structureQuote, Glossary entry, sentence on structure
Traditionally, the sonnet is a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter, employing one of several rhyme schemes, and adhering to a tightly structured thematic organization.
The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Princeton University Presss.v. Sonnet
Poetry Foundation
Wikipedia: Sonnets to Orpheus
WikipediaWorks In This Form: Sonnets to Orpheus, Lead paragraph, sentence naming the formQuote, Works In This Form: Sonnets to Orpheus, Lead paragraph, sentence naming the form
The Sonnets to Orpheus (German: Die Sonette an Orpheus) are a cycle of 55 sonnets written in 1922 by the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926).
Open Questions (1 open question)
The Sicilian Sonnet Question
The sonnet is credited to Giacomo da Lentini and the notaries of the Sicilian School at the court of Frederick II in the early thirteenth century, but only a small corpus of early Sicilian sonnets survives, their relative chronological order is not firmly established, and the extent to which the fixed octave and sestet, and the turn between them, drew on earlier oral or vernacular song traditions that left no written trace cannot be settled from the surviving record.
What would resolve this No new manuscript evidence is expected; the question is treated by scholars of the form as an interpretive one about how much of the Sicilian sonnet's structure was a single deliberate invention versus a codification of practices already circulating orally, rather than a fact-finding gap a future discovery would close.
Medieval Italian philology and the study of the Sicilian SchoolThe Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
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