Sir Philip Sidney, a lauded courtier in Elizabeth I’s court, wrote the first known Petrarchan sonnet sequence in English in the 1580s (titled Astrophil and Stella), and a great many poets opted to use the form from that point until the end of the Renaissance. This question is open to speculation, but what we do know is that Tottel’s Miscellany proved to be very popular, going through ten editions between 15. Title page of the second edition of Astrophil and Stella (1591), courtesy of the British Library. In 1557, long after Wyatt and Surrey had died, an important poetry collection titled Songes and Sonettes (but later referred to as Tottel’s Miscellany) was published, featuring many works by both poets, along with a large number of anonymous poems, including many sonnets. Fellow courtiers in King Henry VIII’s court began to experiment with the sonnet form, most notably Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, who is credited with the English sonnet form (see below). Scholars have long credited Sir Thomas Wyatt with bringing the sonnet to England via his many translations of Petrarch’s sonnets, along with his own compositions. Though it flourished in Italy for over two centuries, the sonnet only reached England in the 1530s. Drawing of Sir Thomas Wyatt by Hans Holbein the Younger (c. Notably, however, the object of affection is rarely given a voice. Some of the most common literary devices used in these poems are similes (e.g., “My love is like a flower”), metaphors (e.g., “My love is a flower”), conceits (e.g., “My love is pollen on the breeze”), and blazons-lengthy descriptions of the parts of the object of affection, usually from the top down (e.g., “My lover’s hair spills like a waterfall / Her eyes do glisten like two polished gems / Her voice is as the bird of heaven’s call” etc.). This style of poetry, written to express the unattainable love for another, is called Petrarchism. The general theme of this sequence of poems is the unattainability of love-the “ speaker” (essentially the poem’s narrator) seeks to love Laura, but is never quite able to obtain her love in return. Petrarch’s famous collection, Il Canzionere, features 366 poems (317 of which are sonnets), chiefly written in praise of a woman named Laura. Portrait of Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) Technically, the sonnet is thought to have been invented in Italy by a thirteenth-century notary named Giacomo da Lentini, but the form was popularized by a fourteenth-century humanist scholar named Francesco Petrarca, usually anglicized as Petrarch. Over the centuries, various poets have taken liberties by deliberately omitting or altering some of these four main components, but the vast majority of the sonnets you come across adhere closely to this form.
The simple answer is that a sonnet is a poetic form made of 14 lines, a standardized rhyme scheme, a consistent meter, and a “ volta” (also known as a “ turn”) that marks a tonal or thematic shift.
But what exactly is a sonnet, and when and why did sonnets become so popular? Thanks largely to the cultural awareness of William Shakespeare’s sonnets in particular (who among us doesn’t know the line “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”), “sonnet” is almost a household word. History of the Sonnet The Sonnet by Shaun Russellįew forms are more associated with Renaissance poetry than the sonnet.
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