Forms
The Sonnet
Also Known As Sonetto
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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 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
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.
Form Of Genre
Sources
1. Sonnet (Wikipedia)
WikipediaIntroductionQuote, Introduction
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.
1. Sonnet (Wikipedia)
WikipediaEtymology sectionQuote, Etymology section
The term derives from the Italian word sonetto (lit. little song, from the Latin word sonus, lit. sound).
1. Sonnet (Wikipedia)
WikipediaLead sectionQuote, Lead section
A sonnet is a fixed poetic form with a structure traditionally consisting of fourteen lines adhering to a set rhyming scheme.
1. Sonnet (Wikipedia)
WikipediaHistory sectionQuote, 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.
The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Princeton University Press
The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Princeton University Presss.v. Sonnet
Poetry Foundation
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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