The Sonnet in the twenty-first century
or: When is a sonnet a sonnet in the Third Millennium?
Based on the sources cited in References & Notes [0]:
Introduction:historical precedents & perspectives on the sonnet
leading to the sonnet as genre in the twenty-first century:
Before we proceed to our synopsis of the sonnet in the twenty-first century, it is expedient for us to examine the standard historical “definitions” or hallmarks of the sonnet, in order to place our study of the contemporary sonnet firmly in its historical and socio-cultural, literary context.
Standard historical “definitions” of the sonnet:
Do “rules” a sonnet make? Conventional “definitions” [1]
According to conventional wisdom, ever since the sonnet was first introduced on the stage in Italian in the early thirteenth century, poets, aficionados and critics have zoomed in on a few clearly definable “characteristics” or “rules” for the sonnet, as itemized below. Here, at least on the surface of things) one affirms that the sonnet must:
1. without exception, be exactly 14 lines long;
2. strictly adhere to the five foot, 10 syllable iambic pentameter ... at least in English. This means, no variants allowed in the metre.
3. As a corollary of 2 above, it naturally follows that if your metre is strict iambic pentameter.
4. At least according to conventional wisdom, the sonnet must adhere to a strict rhyme scheme. 5. A sonnet should have a volta or thematic/ psychological “turning point” or volta at the end of the eighth line, come what may.
6.1 The sestet of Petrarchan sonnets should always be comprised of two tercets of 3 lines each.
6.2 The sestet of Spenserian and Shakespearian sonnets should always be comprised of 1 quatrain followed by a rhyming couplet.
There are of course other considerations to be taken into account in any basic "definition" of the sonnet, as far as definitions go, but those enumerated here will suffice for our purpose.
The historical sonnet:
Given the stringent and all too often inflexible constraints characterizing the structure of the historical sonnet, it is perhaps redundant to belabour the point by providing example after example of sonnets throughout the history of the genre, from ca. 1200 to somewhere in the latter part of the nineteenth century, when the first cracks began to appear in some major sonneteers’ novel approaches to the genre.
For the time being, suffice it to say that even the greatest sonneteers throughout Renaissance and modern history (limiting ourselves to sonnets in English, for the sake of brevity), the likes of Sir Thomas Wyatt, William Shakespeare, Samuel Daniel, John Milton, John Keats and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, pretty much confined themselves to the accepted norms for sonnet structure.
Flagrant Flaws in so-called “sonnets” in the twenty-first century:
Nevertheless, the required elements of the sonnet as enumerated above do not necessarily a sonnet make.
As I was at pains to stress in Vallance Review 62, “When is a sonnet not a sonnet?” , too many sonneteers in the twentieth century stayed hell-bound adherence to the “strict rules” of metre, specifically the de rigueur iambic pentameter, coughing up sonnet after sonnet plagued with “foxtrot” rhythm, where the sonnet appears to trot uniformly along like a bored donkey with scarcely any variance in rhythm. Worse still is the more sluggish “dogtrot”, which is even more stultifying.
One would surely think we have pretty much covered the essential elements of the sonnet. And yet... the long and the short of it is: all too many “contemporary” sonneteers are not contemporary at all. Their sonnets typically are throwbacks to normative models of sonnets commonly accepted in times past (i.e. from the thirteenth to the early twentieth century). The problem is that too many specifics of the paradigms on which Petrarchan versus Shakespearian and English sonnets were based are no longer pertinent to the literary norms of modern poetry. Once again, we need to clearly distinguish between the “rules” or, preferably, the normative components of the models themselves, as enumerated in our conventional definitions of the sonnet above, and the subtle fine points underpinning these norms. The primary defining elements of the sonnet remain the same, and probably always will. However, it is important to realize the very norms underpinning the sonnet's structure are subject to refinements in their psycho-social-cultural context.
In light of the above, let’s serious pitfall of sonnetry in the last century and the present. I refer to...
Cookie cutter writing:
What is cookie cutter writing? You can pretty much tell when any sonneteer indulges in cookie cutter writing when he or she:
a. according to conventional models heavily relies on outworn Renaissance conceits, stock phrases & platitudes;
b. clings stubbornly to themes and, worse yet, hackneyed phraseology (regardless of word order) rehashed so often in historical and contemporary sonnet writing that they have become banal at best. It is one thing to be able to revisit a conventional theme for a sonnet in a fresh new, dynamic perspective, and quite another simply to rely on the old “tried and tested” structural and thematic models for sonnets.
c. You can pretty much tell when someone has written a “cookie cutter” sonnet when it looks uncannily like scores and scores of past sonnets composed in the same vein, on virtually the same theme, and couched in the very style and language you’ve seen over and over again before. If a “modern” sonnet looks and sounds pretty much like a rehash of a sonnet Shakespeare or Keats or E.B. Browning might have written, is it any wonder you have an uncanny sense of déjà vu? If there are still too many recent sonneteers simply rehashing outworn themes, that is surely a symptom of both a lack of the most basic of technical skills in sonnet writing besides being a token of an almost complete absence of inspiration relevant to our own age. [1]
So even in the twentieth century all too many sonneteers, most of them second-rate anyway, stubbornly clung to traditional paradigms of the sonnet, with the unfortunate result that their writing was riddled with what can only be described as fragrant flaws in modern composition and style, confronted as these addled sonneteers were with the intransigent demands of the angst and horrors aggravated from decade to decade. And sadly, many still do.
Revolution in thematics in sonnets:
The following passage is excerpted with major revisions from: Sonnetto Poesia Vol. 1 no. 1 spring = le printemps 2002 (e-zine in 2002, now offline).
From the late Victorian age to at the outset of the last century, many poets were willing to experiment with not only the form but with traditional content of the sonnet. Even in the late Victorian era, some notable poets and sonneteers were already increasingly aware of social inequities plaguing society, undermining centuries old incontrovertible moral precepts governing society, becoming more and more obsessed with issues of human suffering. This rupturing trend was heralded by certain major poets (not sonneteers), most notably Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), who in his Zeitgeist masterpiece, Dover Beach, felt constrained to reach the tragic conclusion, which uncannily strikes us, with our untold fears and anxieties as something that may well be happening right now the early twenty-first century:
.................................Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night. (Italics mine)
1867
Already it is clear that the pie-in-the-sky ideals of Romantic socio-literary values are being swiftly eroded. Perhaps Arnold has the Crimean War in mind, or some other such similar catastrophe. How strangely uncanny it is that he appears, however unwittingly, to prophesy the Welt Angst soon to descend upon the world, as it plummeted headlong into the maelstrom of the twentieth century, riddled with murderous wars on a global scale.
Then we find sonneteers enter the fray. A little later on, Mathilde Blind (1841-1896) goes even further than Matthew Arnold in the bluntness of her poetic style. She unflinchingly raises the kindred spectres of poverty, disease and social despair plaguing so many in the England of her day, “Nipped by the cold touch of relentless fate.”
On another plane, we need only to turn to Gerard Manley Hopkins, Jesuit priest and devout Catholic, to realize how, in the hands of an undisputed master of the sonnet, the central themes of Christianity are so brilliantly finessed. And Hopkins even dared to slap traditional iambic metre straight in the face.
Not merely do poets make a clean break with the traditional sonnet, no longer suffering its polite preoccupation with Romantic love, however profound or the clinging reliance on traditional metrics. Theirs are the sonnets of a brutish time: thematically these poets cut even deeper than the earlier socially controversial sonnets by the likes of Mathilde Blind.
Hear now Rupert Brooke’s unadulterated admiration for his fellow men lost to the Great War well up, in his memorial, The Dead III:
These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
That men call age;
There can be no mistaking. His heartstrings are rent at the mere thought of so many of his colleagues and friends killed. His war-torn world killed his compatriots, killed him, and the starched society he was born into, as to an even greater extent, ours is killing us and quashing our spirits.
Still more bitterly ironic are the words of Wilfred Owen in his apocalyptic sonnet, The End, where he inveighs:
‘My fiery heart shrinks, aching. It is death.
Mine ancient scars shall not be glorified,
Nor my titanic tears, the seas, be dried.’
Owen has deliberately invoked the appalling loss of the Titanic, following hard on the heels of unknown territory, the twentieth century. With the sinking world’s largest and “unsinkable” liner on April 15 1912, Victorian ideals are shattered once and for all. Titanic hopes dashed by titanic fears, had already, by 1914, turned out to be one of the relentless obsessions of twentieth century poetry, sonnets being no exception to the rule. Nationalistic European sonneteers, the likes of Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) and Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), all disillusioned, shell-shocked poets, were plunged headlong into the horrors the Great War. Any vestiges of the Victorian Age were reduced to ashes in the sonnets of that gruesome war which fatalistically slaughtered almost all of the “war poets”. The sheer fantastic irony of this horror is that it is no longer a big deal at all.. The sonnets of the American poet, Alan Seeger (1888-1916), another of those killed in World War I, betray the same stark thematic shift. Here we find Seeger deploring the fate of the lover. The language has become not only bitterly ironic, but mordant in tone and theme, but in literary style. In his Sonnet VIII, he laments:
I have been oft where human life sold cheap
And seen men's brains spilled out about their ears
And yet that never cost me any sleep;
I lived untroubled and I shed no tears.
Fools prate how war is an atrocious thing; (italics mine)
Like I said, no big surprise here, not for us, not for Alan Seeger. The sonnet has irrevocably severed the umbilical cord to its past.
As for Edna Saint-Vincent Millay (1892-1950), her obsession with the harshness of love in the twentieth century ring unequivocally and intensely true:
I shall forget you, as I said, but now,
If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protest you with my favorite vow.
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And vows were not so brittle as they are, ...
So much for the chivalric vows of love in Renaissance sonnets, and the fawning over love in sonnets of the Romantic era. Dead in the water. Here we are practically slapped in the face with the infidelity of love and lack of commitment to it so pervasive in the last century and continuing into the twenty-first. Human angst as intense as this, which is so starkly portrayed in the sexually morbid paintings of Gustave Klimt, rapidly settles in as one of the predominant fatalistic themes of twentieth century verse in all forms, including the sonnet.
Pablo Neruda, in his fiery Cien Sonetos de Amor, brought this obsession with love to a head at right down to the gut level in his colloquial Spanish, all the while investing his generally unrhymed, free-form sonnets with the most vivid, passionate imagery. A single instance suffices to drive the point home:
XII
Mañana
Plena mujer, manzana carnal, luna caliente,
espeso aroma de algas, lodo y luz machacados,
qu‚ oscura claridad se abre entre tus columnas?
Que antigua noche el hombre toca con sus sentidos?
From Neruda’s “Cien Sonetos de Amor = One Hundred Love Sonnets”
Translation by the reviewer:
XII
Tomorrow
Oh woman rich and fleshy apple, fiery moon,
Oh pungent seaweed, mud and light in masquerade,
What secrecy of clarity is opened in your columns?
What ancient night touches a man in his senses?
(translation by the reviewer)
