Background Information
Poetry can be divided into three main categories: epic, dramatic, and lyric. Epic poems in the British tradition reach as far back Anglo-Saxon times with the discovery of The Exeter Book's Beowulf. Dramatic poems are the monologues and dialogues that are written in an author's created voice. Some examples of these would be Browning's "My Last Duchess" or Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade". Lyric poetry, originally performed by the ancient Greeks with a lyre or harp, expresses personal feelings. Lyric has since evolved into other forms including (but not limited to): ballads, ode, rondeau, villanelle, sonnets. For purposes of this unit we will be studying the sonnet.
The Sonnet
The form of the sonnet emerged during the Italian Middle Ages. Sonnets were popularized by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) and Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374) during this time period and were later refined in France and Spain during the 16 th century.
Consisting of 14 lines of iambic pentameter, the sonnet is the most widely-known subgenre of lyric poetry in the Western world. Borrowing its name from the Italian word sonnetto, meaning little song, sonnets were most widely popular during the 16 th century. Typically, sonnets are a fixed form of lyric poetry that can be written in several different styles. The primary forms that appear on the AP English Literature and Composition exam are Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets.
Petrarchan sonnets, named after the 14 th century poet Petrarch, are also known as Italian sonnets. The Italian sonnet consists of two main sections. The first section is an octave, eight lines, that follows the rhyme scheme abbaabba. The second stanza is a sestet, six lines, which have variable rhyme schemes. The most common are: cdecde, cdccdc, or cdcdcd.
English, or Shakespearean sonnets, fundamentally follow a similar format. Instead of containing an octave/sestet split, English sonnets are composed of three quatrains and conclude with a couplet of two rhyming lines. The rhyme scheme for an English sonnet is abab, cdcd, efef, gg.
I have provided a comparison chart below of the Italian and English sonnets:
Shakespearean Sonnets
Since the bulk of the sonnets I will be covering in class were written by Shakespeare, my students should know something about the circumstances of their composition. I do not want to focus too much on his life, but more on the traditional Shakespearean sonnet form and how and why Shakespeare, at times, diverges from those conventions.
Although it is unsure when Shakespeare wrote his sonnets, they were first published in 1609 by Thomas Thorpe, as SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS: Never before imprinted. The collection contains 154 sonnets written by William Shakespeare. Elizabethan poets were known for writing sonnet sequences, or cycles. Shakespeare's sonnets 1-17 are commonly referred to the Get Married, Young Man sequence. These sonnets are written to a young male friend or lover and in many sonnets urge him to marry and have children. Sonnets 18-126 are bit milder and it could be argued who the actual sequence is written to because there are shifts in addressee. Sonnets 127-52 are commonly referred to The Dark Ladie sonnets. These sonnets stray from spiritual or familial love, found in the Get Married, Young Man sequence, and are highly sexualized in content.
Students may ask why Shakespeare chose to differ from the Italian form. Joseph Rosenblum, in The Greenwood Companion Shakespeare Vol. 4: Romances and Poetry, claims that there are two obvious reasons Shakespeare chose this form of the sonnet. First, there is the advantage of the three sections. Since the English sonnet contains three quatrains it allows the author to develop an idea through three different stages that are parallel. This parallelism unifies this larger argument, which is then capped by the couplet.
The second claim is that this structure makes use of the greater variety of rhymes to be found in English. 5 English words don't typically end with vowels. Italian words, on the other hand, most commonly end with feminine vowel endings that are quite limited in variety. This allows for an extended repetitive rhyme scheme. The language of English sonnets can accommodate more rhyme changes, and this in turn leads to more breaks in thematic development within the sonnet.
Free Verse
Straying from the conventions of traditional poetic forms, free verse doesn't lend itself to typical patterns. Although it can lack meter and rhyme, that doesn't necessarily mean that it lacks structure — it just lacks formalized structure. This unit relies on students being able to recognize metrical and rhyming patterns, like those in the sonnet, and being able to see the absence of such patterns in poems that seem to lack structure. It is important to note that free verse isn't just a rebellion to fixed forms of poetry, but more of an extension of what poetry can be. Despite this lack of formalized structure, free verse employs the use of varying lengths, strong repetitions of phrases, inventive use of typeset and space, etc.
Comments: