Left-click: rotate, Mouse-wheel/middle-click: zoom, Right-click: pan, Escape: close
Sonnets
- Fourteen line
- Iambic pentameter, unstressed stressed $\implies$ 5 iambs
- Strict rhythm and rhyme
- Love??!
Petrarchan
- Francesco Petrarch
- Composed of two stanzas, the octave (the first eight lines) followed by the answering sestet (final six lines)
- Octave typically presents an argument, observation of question.
- This is followed by a turn, or volta, which occurs between the eighth and ninth lines.
- The sestet operates as a counterargument, clarification, or answer.
- Rhyme scheme = abba, abba, cdecde or cdcdcd.
Note, don't just say "rhyme scheme is this". You gotta explain what effect this has!
Shakespearean
- Three quatrains and a couplet
- Couplet often works as the volta did before it, forming a conclusion, extension or rebuttal
- Couplet usually most significant for Shakespeare
- Rhyme scheme = abab, cdcd, efef, gg
Spenserian
- 16th century Edmund Spenser
- Quatrains connected, like Petrarchan
- Reduced the often excessive final couplet, less pressure to resolve the foregoing argument, observation, or question.
- Rhyme scheme = abab, bcbc, cdcd, ee
Themes
- Shakespeare: Passage of time, love, infidelity, jealousy, beauty, mortality, and feelings of incompetence.
Cummings' Sonnets
-
Stuck to 14 lines, but other than that other features were kinda wacky. They didn't "look like sonnets".
-
Strong sense of Romanticism, i.e. where feeling held sway over thinking and emotion over reason.
- Taking the old and making it relevant for the modern age?
- Appreciating the beauty of elements of the past?
So what makes a sonnet a sonnet? Who knows. (No concrete label)
Cummings plays around with the form, and specifically punctuation and grammar. And excessive enjambment.
Things to think about
- Cummings abandons the traditional structure of the Petrarchan sonnet…
- Cummings forgoes the strict rhythm and rhyme of the Shakespearean sonnet in order to…
- The sonnet form is associated with the Renaissance period but shares many thematic concerns with the Romantics. Cummings, a traditionalist in many senses, manipulates the conventions of the form in order to…
- Ezra Pound’s maxim, “make it new”, is the hallmark of the literary modernist movement. Cummings’ reworkings of the sonnet form allow him to…
- While experimenting with the physical layout of the poem, Cummings still adheres to the structural elements of typical sonnets with the latter part of the poem being a reflection on the earlier lines and a volta, of sorts, occurring in...
You can swap out Cummings for (T.S) Elliot for further thinky.
