The Sonnet Now: Inverting Forms & Other Modern Twists
Although the sonnet originated in 13th-century Italy, it remains one of the most recognized structures – sometimes embraced, sometimes rejected, but never forgotten. Welcome back to English class at The Poetry Lab for our second installment on the sonnet, then and now.
Last week we looked at the history of the sonnet during premodern times🔗. We journeyed through different types of sonnets, including Italian, Petrachan, English, and Spenserian, and explored how these different types emerged at different historical moments.
This week we’ll continue our exploration into the modern era. We’ll look at how romantic, Victorian, modern, and contemporary poets play with the form. We’ll discuss how some poets use traditional Petrarchan sonnet form but invert the usual 2-part problem-resolution structure, like Enda St. Vincent Millay, while others make up their form because 14 lines just feel too long, like Gerard Manley Hopkins. We’ll also check out what’s happening with sonnets today, and how poets are calling attention to the problematic history of the form as a way of reframing how we think and talk about legacies of social inequality, within our poetry and our communities.
Everything Unpopular is Cool Again:
The Romantics and Victorians
After the Renaissance, the sonnet became the unpopular kid at the party. That is, until the Romantics revived it in the late 18th century. Romantic poets found a virtue of this short poetic form in that it can treat a range of themes, from lover’s conceits and the pain of unrequited love to considerations of time, the power of art, death, and more basically what it means to be a human in the world, with all the emotional highs and lows that follow.
It’s ironic that Romantic poets, known for their freedom and spontaneity with verse, would flock to the sonnet, but some of us are drawn to the challenge of meeting its structure and breaking it for effect.
As poet Terrance Hayes says about the challenge of the sonnet: “If you can breakdance, that’s cool. If you can breakdance in a straitjacket, that’s even better.”
Many Romantic writers, including William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, did just that, opting to play most often with the Petrarchan sonnet. One of the best-known examples of this in English is Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much With Us”:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathéd horn.
Wordsworth’s sonnet becomes a mini manifesto for the romantic movement in literature and art. The poem begins by referring to the modern world (“The world”) as obsessed with money and consumerism. It claims that “Getting and spending” provides soulless pleasures. The modern world is “too much with us” because it has come to dominate our lives and disconnect us from nature and beauty, things that can’t be easily quantified in capitalist society. The speaker urges us to seek out wonder and sensual pleasures instead. We get a sexy, naked sea and wind like a party animal that howls us awake all night until we all sleep soundly like flowers. This sonnet seems to urge us all: spend less money and sleep more in meadows. A message I think we all can get behind.
Thrifty and math-minded Gerard Manley Hopkins invented an interesting twist of the Petrarchan sonnet, a shrunken version reduced to 3/4 its usual size, cutting the octave to a six-line stanza and the sestet to a four and a half-line stanza. The resulting ten-and-a-half-line poem is known as a curtal (as in “curtailed”) sonnet. It’s curious to wonder, what exactly is a half line in poetry? Many curtal sonnets feel as though the first ten lines exist in order to emphasize the final half line. Here’s an example from Hopkins’s “Peace”:
When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite
To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?
O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.
The poem personifies Peace, asking when it’s going to show up. Sure, the poetic speaker admits, it shows up “sometimes,” but he wants it around him constantly, like an unattainable lover. If it came, there’d be no more “daunting wars” and battlefield deaths. The final half line provides the emotional gravity of the poem. Peace turns ominous. When it does arrive, don’t expect something with sweet words. This peace “comes to brood and sit,” to terrify us all with its slow and sometimes frightening movements. Perhaps the poem warns us to rethink what we call for when we demand peace.
Victorians played with the sonnet form as much as the Elizabethans did, and some well-known practitioners of the time include the Rossettis, George Meredith, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who wrote Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), a sequence to her lover and poet husband Robert Browning. Her wildly popular sonnet sequence is most famous for its penultimate poem, “Sonnet 43”:
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
What seems to begin as a list poem takes a surprising turn. Barrett Browning presents true love here as long-lasting and eternal, but also suggests a tension inherent in the act of loving another person: love is an attachment to earthly life and the things of this world, and love is something that transcends life on earth. Evoking her religious faith likens the romantic love she feels for her beloved to a religious or spiritual feeling. Romantic love, for this poetic speaker, is ultimately linked to and perhaps indistinguishable from love for God. This is a big deal. Previous sonnet traditions would have understood such a claim as blasphemous!
Inverting Forms: Modern Ghost Lovers
To the modernists, the sonnet represented the worst of the Victorian era. Its formal pattern was complicit, many poets claimed, with production-line thinking and industrialized culture. Wallace Stevens declared, “Perish all sonnets!” Ezra Pound called the sonnet “the devil” and referred to it as Western culture’s first mass-produced form of art, little more than lyric reduced to a blueprint. Yet poets like Robert Lowell, W.H. Auden, and Edna St. Vincent Millay continued to evolve the sonnet form by creating their variations, which tend to be more extreme than we’ve seen in previous centuries, often rejecting rhyme schemes and inverting structure.
Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, a series of 55 poems, meditates on the relationship between poetry and life, writing about the luscious curves of bodies to stress the need for us all to practice acceptance toward change and transformation in the face of life’s inevitable and ever-demanding ups and downs. Be as flexible in life as your body is, Rilke seems to suggest.
Millay’s “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why” is a great example of how modern poets rework the Petrarch roots of the poetic form. This poem is famous for its lamenting romantic voice, which follows sonnet tradition—but the speaker doesn’t sound particularly sad about missing any specific lover, unattainable or not.
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
The speaker doesn’t remember the faces or names of the people whom she once kissed. It’s not the “ghosts” but the romance of it all, and perhaps youth, that the speaker misses. In the first eight lines, the speaker, much like Shakespeare’s speaker, enumerates fading memories and describes the feeling of remembering as bringing with it the pain of loss: “… the rain / Is full of ghosts tonight … / And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain.” The volta comes at line nine, not at the end of the sonnet, signaled by the term “Thus” and a strong, stressed syllable. “Thus” hits like a wall of bricks, forcing the reader to pause and reorient within the poem. Now we’ve shifted from the pain of memory to a metaphorical, wintery world inhabited by a solitary tree, which stands in for the figure of the poetic speaker, who laments time, romance, love, seasons – everything but specific lovers.
Poets of the Harlem Renaissance like Countee Cullen and Claude McKay experimented with the sonnet forms to reflect on Black life in America and racial inequality, using the structured body of the poem to reflect on how not all bodies are structured to matter in American society. McKay’s “America” provides a prime example:
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate,
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
“America” channels the poetic speaker’s ambivalent feelings about an adopted country. The speaker confesses love even though the country erects oppressive “hate” towards people like him. The poem illustrates the speaker’s struggle to call a country that hates him home. The speaker suggests that this internal conflict ultimately makes him stronger if not also bitter. By calling America “this cultured hell that tests my youth,” he further underscores his emotional conflict, suggesting that even at its best, living in the country is a constant—and often torturous—challenge. The speaker’s home country is the would-be lover who won’t love the speaker in return. In the end, the poem reaches an emotional balance, suggesting that although the pain and vitality of American life sweeps over him, the speaker cannot and will not be swept away or forgotten.
The experimentalist vein of literary Modernism opened the sonnet form to themes of love and longing on socio-political levels and introduced, thanks in part to e.e. cummings’ typographical play that continues in the works of contemporary poets reframing the form today.
Contemporary Sonnets
Okay, folks: We’ve traveled from the Petrarchan era through Shakespearean times, the Romantics, and Modernism, bringing us to the present moment. What’s the sonnet up to nowadays?
Sonnets by contemporary poets are characteristically loose with structure, meter, and rhyme, pushing the boundaries of the form further (as we poets do):
“Some [sonnets] are so loose as to contain only a “ghost” of the sonnet within them, but many fall somewhere in between, allowing the meter to overflow the line a bit, or allowing slant rhyme instead of full rhyme… Over the past 150 years, the sonnet has been allowed to evolve, and it proves to be a flexible box.” - Rachel Richardson, PoetryFoundation.org
Features that unite contemporary sonnets so far include a concern with the volta – marking a thematic turn somewhere in the course of the piece – and a redirection of love toward the poetic self and social identities not often represented with traditional literary canons. The sonnet form, with its history and perceived sophistication, can lend the grace and dignity not often afforded to literary representations outside of white, heteronormative culture. Contemporary poets play with this dynamic in a host of ways. There are endless, rich examples.
Terrance Hayes’ collection American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin takes on the U.S.’s past and present racial violence and discrimination in 70 sonnets all of the same name, “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin”. Hayes addresses the sonnet form within the collection. For example, in this poem, the speaker describes the American sonnet as part “prison,” “panic closet,” “music box,” and “meat grinder”:
I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison,
Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.
I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat
Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone.
Calling out the claustrophobic aspects of the sonnet while using it throughout his collection hints at the complex relationship poets have with rules and restriction, and perhaps by extension, the art and craft of writing more broadly.
In Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets, the collection is structured like a dark odyssey. The poet adopts the sonnet as they embark on a “restless search for beauty or relief,” which meanders through side quests involving the speaker’s childhood in small-town America, chance encounters, the loss of loved ones during the 1980s AIDS epidemic, a mother’s love of tv dinners, and a father’s early death. One of the poems in the collection that addresses the sonnet form begins,
The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do
without. To have, as my mother says, a wish in one hand
and shit in another.
These Lines speak to the interplay of ethics and aesthetics in the collection, using markers of “high art” (which the sonnet will always be, in large part because of the cultural capital many place on Shakespeare) and unmasking their intersections with “low culture,” or cultures not represented in art because they’re defined as less than, excessive, or violating decorum in some way. The sonnet’s economy of language is revived, if for a moment, from its patriarchal lineage when Seuss gives us lines like “A sonnet is a mother. Every word / a silver dollar.” Here the lineage is maternal. Through the limited space and confines of the sonnet form, the poetic speaker slows the world down for a few beats, allowing the reader to mine meaning from the chaotic and disjointed moments in life – what one poem refers to as “a nonfussy definition / of the Sublime” – without glossing over hardships related to class and gender inequality.
Fun fact: The poems in frank: sonnets were arranged for publication in the book “not in the order of their living but in the order of their making,” writes Diane Seuss, in order to capture “the improvisational nature of memory.” [Source: Marbles on the Floor]
Nicole Sealey’s poem “Legendary” uses the sonnet form to hold the persona voice of Venus Xtravaganza, the narrator of the documentary Paris is Burning (1990), which chronicles ball culture of New York and the African American, Latino, queer, and trans communities involved in the cultural movement.
I would like to be a spoiled rich white girl.
VENUS XTRAVAGANZA
I want to be married in church. In white.
Nothing borrowed or blue. I want a white
house in Peekskill, far from the city—white
picket fence fencing in my lily-white
lilies. O, were I whiter than white.
A couple kids: one girl, one boy. Both white.
Birthright. All the amenities of white:
golf courses, guesthouses, garage with white
washer/dryer set. Whatever else white
affords, I want. In multiples of white.
Two of nothing is something, if they’re white.
Never mind another neutral. Off-white
won’t do. Capeesh? I want to be white
as the unsparing light at tunnel’s end.
Each ten-syllable line ends with the term “white,” creating a tight physical space on the page where Xtravaganza’s voice freewheels in reflection on how whiteness is pervasive and socially elevated, not seen as an evasive epidemic but a naturalized structure, much like the sonnet. Unlike traditional use of the sonnet to praise—and objectify—a female love interest, Sealey is using the sonnet to unearth colonialized values and aesthetics, turning the form on its head.
Poets from Shakespeare and Spenser to Sealey, Seuss, and Hayes have found the sonnet to be a didactic, powerful form. It can be a field of play, the perfect setting for a poet to feel out and break the rules. With origins rooted in patriarchal and colonialist values, the best contemporary takes on the form seem to subvert its notions of containment or restriction. Or better yet, they use that effect stylistically to propel their message, with the form serving the deeper meaning of the piece.
It’s also understandable that some poets just aren’t into sonnets.
Major kudos for reading this anyway, if that’s you!
Even if classical form doesn’t draw you—or you downright hate it—the poetic devices employed can be helpful knowledge to have in your craft toolbox.
If you’d like to explore more examples of contemporary poets doing interesting things with the sonnet form, check out these links:
“American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin [Seven of the ten things]” by Terrance Hayes
“Mexican American Sonnet” by Iliana Rocha
“The Tradition” by Jericho Brown
“Are All the Break-Ups in Your Poems Real?” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
“Why I Don’t Piss in the Ocean” by Maggie Dietz
“My Daughter La Chola” by Farid Matuk
This article was posted on May 1, 2023. Written by:
