12-21-2023, 12:09 PM
I started this midwinter thing a couple of years ago, and this year, instead of doing 12 days of various forms, the challenge will last fourteen days, from the 24th of December to the 6th of January, and the goal will be to produce a crown of sonnets! Or, at least, something approximating it....
What I'm curious about for this thread is the question of what exactly constitutes a sonnet. I hesitated to not qualify our goal because a crown of sonnets, from what I understand, is defined strictly enough: fourteen (or fifteen) poems where the last line of the last is the same as the first line of the first (or the last line of each is the first line of the succeeding). Of course, all these parentheticals suggest that the form isn't that strict at all, especially when compared to what is supposed to constitute it, but take for instance that sonnet collection by which I first learned meter -- Shakespeare's 126th has but 12 lines -- or George Meredith's Modern Love, where all the so-called sonnets have 16. I'd likewise hesitate to suggest that sonnets, especially modern ones, need to follow a particular rhyme scheme or meter, e.g. Ted Berrigan's The Sonnets, and obviously whether a sonnet's sub-units have to be three quatrains and a couplet or two quatrains and two tercets has been in question since the Middle Ages. All this leaves me with but two ideas -- that a sonnet must have a volta, and that it must be lyrical -- supplemented with how a sonnet must be around 14 lines, but what do you think?
What I'm curious about for this thread is the question of what exactly constitutes a sonnet. I hesitated to not qualify our goal because a crown of sonnets, from what I understand, is defined strictly enough: fourteen (or fifteen) poems where the last line of the last is the same as the first line of the first (or the last line of each is the first line of the succeeding). Of course, all these parentheticals suggest that the form isn't that strict at all, especially when compared to what is supposed to constitute it, but take for instance that sonnet collection by which I first learned meter -- Shakespeare's 126th has but 12 lines -- or George Meredith's Modern Love, where all the so-called sonnets have 16. I'd likewise hesitate to suggest that sonnets, especially modern ones, need to follow a particular rhyme scheme or meter, e.g. Ted Berrigan's The Sonnets, and obviously whether a sonnet's sub-units have to be three quatrains and a couplet or two quatrains and two tercets has been in question since the Middle Ages. All this leaves me with but two ideas -- that a sonnet must have a volta, and that it must be lyrical -- supplemented with how a sonnet must be around 14 lines, but what do you think?