Sonnet Discussion

1. ELIZABETHAN SONNNETS
SHAKESPEREAN AND PETRARCHAN STYLE

2. WHAT IS A SONNNET AND SONNET CYCLE
• A lyric poem consisting
of a single stanza of
fourteen iambic
pentameter lines
linked by an intricate
rhyme scheme
Sonnet sequences, or sonnet cycles, is a series of sonnets are
linked together by exploring the varied aspects of a
relationship between lovers, or else by indicating a
development in the relationship that constitutes a kind of
implicit plot.

3. ELIZABETHAN SONNET SEQUENCES
• During the early 15th century, it peeps through the English shore. The great sonneteers of the
Elizabethan era were Sir Thomas Wyatt, Earl of Surrey, Philip Sydney, Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel,
Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare.
• Sir Thomas Wyatt: - Sir Thomas Wyatt is the innovative Sonnet writer in English literature. His thirty one
sonnets are noteworthy. They appeared in Tottel’s Miscellany published on 1557. Ten of these sonnets
were the translation from Petrarch. Apart from couplet ending, which Wyatt introduced, it had a
Petrarchan model. Even though following Petrarch’s models closely, he remains the pioneer in the realm
of English literature in his own art of presentation and imagery.

4. SONNET
• A sonnet is a poetic form which originated in the poetry composed at the Court of the Holy Roman
Emperor Frederick II in the Sicilian city of Palermo. The 13th-century poet and notary Giacomo da Lentini
is credited with the sonnet’s invention and the Sicilian School of poets who surrounded him then spread
the form to the mainland. The earliest sonnets, however, no longer survive in the original Sicilian
language, but only after being translated into Tuscan dialect.
• The term sonnet is derived from the Italian word sonetto (lit. “little song”, derived from the Latin word
sonus, meaning a sound). By the 13th century it signified a poem of fourteen lines that followed a strict
rhyme scheme and structure.
• According to Christopher Blum, during the Renaissance, the sonnet became the “choice mode of
expressing romantic love.” During that period too, the form was taken up in many other European
language areas and eventually any subject was considered acceptable for writers of sonnets. Impatience
with the set form resulted in many variations over the centuries, including abandonment of the
quatorzain limit and even of rhyme altogether in modern times.

5. ITALIAN SONNET
• The Italian or Petrarchan
sonnet (named after the
fourteenthcentury Italian poet
Petrarch) falls into two main
parts: an octave (eight lines)
rhyming abbaabba followed by
a sestet (six lines) rhyming
cdecde or some variant, such
as cdccd

6. PETRARCHAN SONNET CONTINUED.....
• The sonnet is split in two stanzas: the “octave” or “octet”
(of 8 lines) and the “sestet” (of 6 lines), for a total of 14
lines.
• The octave typically introduces the theme or problem
using a rhyme scheme of ABBAABBA. The sestet provides
resolution for the poem and rhymes variously, but usually
follows the schemes of CDECDE or CDCCDC.

7. EXTRA INFORMATION ON ITALIAN SONNET
• Petrarch’s sonnets were first imitated in England, both in their stanza form and their subject—the hopes
and pains of an adoring male lover—by Sir Thomas Wyatt in the early sixteenth century.
• The Petrarchan form was later used, and for a variety of subjects, by Milton, Wordsworth, Christina
Rossetti, D. G. Rossetti, and other sonneteers, who sometimes made it technically easier in English
(which does not have as many rhyming possibilities as Italian) by introducing a new pair of rhymes in
the second four lines of the octave.

8. ENGLISH SONNET
• The Earl of Surrey and other English
experimenters in the sixteenth century also
developed a stanza form called the English
sonnet, or else the Shakespearean sonnet,
after its greatest practitioner.
• This sonnet falls into three quatrains and a
concluding couplet: abab cdcd efef gg.
• There was one notable variant, the
Spenserian sonnet, in which Spenser linked
each quatrain to the next by a continuing
rhyme: abab bebe cdcd ee.

9. IMPORTANT ELIZABETHAN SONNNET SEQUENCES
• John Donne shifted from the hitherto standard subject, sexual love, to a variety of religious themes in
his Holy Sonnets, written early in the seventeenth century; and Milton, in the latter part of that century,
expanded the range of the sonnet to other matters of serious concern
• Except for a lapse in the English Neoclassic Period, the sonnet has remained a popular form to the
present day and includes among its distinguished practitioners, in the nineteenth century, Wordsworth,
Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and more recently
Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, and Dylan
Thomas.

10. EARL OF SURREY
• Earl of Surrey:-Sir Thomas Wyatt was
successfully followed by his contemporary
and follower, Henry Howard, Earl of
Surrey. His poem appears along with
Wyatt in Tottel’s Miscellany. They are
chiefly lyrical and includes a few sonnets,
the first of their kind composed in English
or Shakespearian mode. This is an
arrangement of three quatrains followed
by a couplet (ab ab, cd cd, ef ef, gg). In
development of English verse Surrey
represents a matured metre which
Shakespeare copied and know after him.

11. SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
• Philip Sydney:-The next remarkable name
among the English Sonneteers is Sir Philip
Sydney. He was successful in more than one
branch of literature. In the development of
English sonnet his finest achievement was his
Astrophel and Stella which contains a series
of 108 sonnets about his own frustrated love
for Lady Penelope Rich, the daughter of the
Earl of Essex. Like Wyatt his sonnets owe
much to Petrarch and Ronsard in tone and
style which places Sydney as the greatest
Elizabethan sonneteer along with
Shakespeare.

12. MICHAEL DRAYTON
•
Michael Drayton:-Drayton, another
sonneteer of Elizabethan age may claim some
attention. He is really an inspired poet. Drayton
reached the highest level of poetic feeling and
expression in Idea a sonnet sequence. It is not
known if his Idea represents one woman or
several or more. The title was borrowed from an
extensive sonnet sequence in French called ‘lidee
by Claude the pontoux’.