Jon wrote:
> Englands Helicon includes all sorts of poems calling themselves
> sonnets which don't fit what we think of as a sonnet pattern. I'm not
> sure if these fit some other definition of sonnet, or if the poets of
> that time were just using "sonnet" to mean "lyric poem."
>
> Wait a minute, lemme lug out my OED. Let's see, sonnet, here it is.
> It gives the standard definition (14 lines, etc.) first, but as a
> second definition, a short lyric poem, esp. of amatory character, and
> it notes that between 1580 and 1650 the word was freely used in either
> way.
As a rule-of-thumb (though it doesn't have much etymological substance) I
use "sonnet" (two n's) to refer to the 14-liners and "sonet" to refer to the
short lyric thing. Donne's _Songs and Sonets_ [his spelling] didn't have
any 14-line poems at all, and I think (I'm not absolutely certain, but I
could look it up) he used the "sonnet" spelling when listing the religious
14-line poems he wrote.
From the beginning in England -- i.e. in Wyatt -- sonnets [sic] weren't
limited to love poems. Wyatt carefully rewrites at least two Petrarchan
sonnets, adding a political dimension -- "Whoso list to hunt" and "The
pillar perished is". This is obscured since between 1558 and 1900, Wyatt
was read in Tottel's Miscellany, which solders on totally inappropriate
non-Wyatt titles -- "The Lover Complaineth that he is Bereft of His Beloved"
[roughly] when Wyatt is writing about the death of his political patron
Thomas Cromwell. And of course the only decent poem Surrey wrote was a
non-erotic sonnet -- "When Windsor walls sustained my weary arm." (Thinking
about it, most of Surrey's sonnets aren't love poems.)
The sonnet = love-poem tight linkage tends to come in, in England, with the
idea/rediscovery of the sonnet *sequence, in the wake of Sidney's _Astrophil
and Stella_ -- I think all the sequences, certainly the Big Four (Sidney,
Greville, Spenser and Shakespeare) were predomiantly though not exclusively
love poetry -- but non-erotic sonnets were being written at the same time,
as individual poems, even then. Ralegh's sonnet on his son, for instance,
"Three things there be that flourish up apace."
Then there's Milton, Wordsworth, et alia. Not much into love sonnets, them.
My feeling is that currently, most poets working in the sonnet, or
sonnet-derived forms (Hal -- would this apply to you?) are more interested
in the idea of the sonnet sequence than the sonnet as an individual poem.
Which would carry us back to Berryman's Sonnets (not just part of The Sonnet
Tradition but a virtual homage to Shakepeare's Sonnets) and Lowell's
Notebook, History/For Lizzie and Harriet (14 line loosely iambic unrhymed).
Edwin Morgan's career is heavily punctuated with sonnet *sequences-- _50
Renaissance Sonnets_, "Glasgow Sonnets", _Sonnets From Scotland_ -- I think
there are others. Certainly, this would be linked to the way Eddie thought
that the way forward now wasn't the long poem any more, but the sequence.
Rodent
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