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| Petrarchan sonnets | |
|---|---|
| Name | Petrarchan sonnet |
| Form | Sonnet |
| Language | Italian; adapted into English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese |
| Meter | Typically hendecasyllable in Italian; iambic pentameter in English adaptations |
| Rhyme scheme | Octave (abbaabba) + sestet (cdecde or cdcdcd variants) |
| Originating culture | Italian Renaissance |
| Notable authors | Francesco Petrarca; adaptations by William Wordsworth; Elizabeth Barrett Browning |
Petrarchan sonnets are a sonnet form originating in Renaissance Italy, notable for a two-part structure that separates an eight-line octave from a six-line sestet and often features a thematic or rhetorical "turn" between them. The form crystallized in the work of Francesco Petrarca, whose sequence of poems addressed to Laura influenced successive generations of poets across Italy, England, France, Spain, and beyond. Petrarchan sonnets became a principal vehicle for lyric expression during the Renaissance, shaping sonnet culture in courts, academies, and literary salons linked to figures such as Cosimo de' Medici, Lorenzo de' Medici, and institutions like the Accademia della Crusca.
The Petrarchan sonnet is defined by an octave of eight lines followed by a sestet of six lines; the octave commonly poses a situation, question, or problem, and the sestet offers resolution, counterargument, or reflection. Early exemplars appear in the Italian lyrical tradition associated with Dolce Stil Novo, Guido Cavalcanti, and the circles around Dante Alighieri, while the perfected model is associated with poems collected by Francesco Petrarca in the Canzoniere. Performance and manuscript culture tied to patrons such as Pope Urban VIII and Cardinal Bembo helped standardize the form across European courts including Mantua, Florence, and Venice.
Canonical rhyme patterns for the octave are most often abbaabba, aligning with Italian hendecasyllables used by poets like Petrarca and later imitators such as Torquato Tasso and Giovanni Boccaccio's contemporaries. The sestet allows more variation: classical prescriptions include cdecde, cdcdcd, or cdedce, choices that poets such as Michelangelo Buonarroti and Ludovico Ariosto employed differently. English-language poets adapted these schemes into iambic pentameter, with practitioners like John Milton and William Shakespeare experimenting with rhyme liberties; the latter famously favored the English/Shakespearean sonnet form alongside direct engagement with Petrarchan models. Continental poets in France and Spain adapted rhyme via alexandrines and end-stress patterns, seen in the work of Pierre de Ronsard and Garcilaso de la Vega.
The sonnet originated in thirteenth-century Sicily and evolved through troubadour and courtly lyric traditions associated with the Norman Kingdom of Sicily and the House of Anjou in southern Italy, drawing from forms used by Sicilian School poets and troubadours linked to Ferdinand II of Sicily. The Petrarchan model was consolidated by Francesco Petrarca during the fourteenth century in works that circulated widely in manuscript and early print, influencing humanist scholars including Erasmus of Rotterdam, Aldus Manutius, and patrons like Pope Clement VII. Petrarch's blending of classical rhetorical training—from sources such as Cicero and Ovid—with vernacular lyric practice gave the sonnet intellectual prestige in Renaissance humanism linked to the University of Padua and the University of Bologna.
Petrarchan sonnets spread rapidly: Petrarchism shaped Elizabethan poetry via translations and imitations by figures linked to the Court of Elizabeth I such as Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and later by Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney. In France, the form informed the work of the Pléiade poets including Joachim du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard, while in Spain it influenced Garcilaso de la Vega and Lope de Vega within Golden Age lyric traditions. Portuguese, German, and Polish literatures absorbed Petrarchan models through networks connecting Luís de Camões, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Jan Kochanowski to Italian sources. In later centuries, movements from Romanticism—represented by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson—recast Petrarchan themes within new aesthetic frameworks, and modernists like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound engaged the sonnet's legacy experimentally.
Key early practitioners include Francesco Petrarca, Guido Cavalcanti, Dante Alighieri, and Cecco Angiolieri. Renaissance and early modern exponents comprise Pietro Bembo, Torquato Tasso, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Garcilaso de la Vega, Pierre de Ronsard, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Edmund Spenser, and Philip Sidney. Later notable figures are William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Donne, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Bishop, and W. H. Auden. Famous sequences and landmark examples include Petrarch's Canzoniere, Shakespeare's sonnets (noting interplay between forms), Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, and John Donne's Holy Sonnets for metrical and rhetorical innovation.
In Italian, the default metre is the hendecasyllable; poetic devices such as enjambment and synalepha shape lineation in works by Petrarca, Tasso, and Ariosto. English adaptations commonly use iambic pentameter, with stress-timed rhythm creating different sonority as seen in works by John Milton, William Shakespeare, and John Keats. French sonneteers often relied on alexandrines and normative rhyme classes enforced by institutions like the Académie Française, while Spanish metrics used hendecasyllables and end-stress patterns in Golden Age verse by Garcilaso de la Vega and Lope de Vega. Translation choices, including those by Arthur Golding and Lord Tennyson, affected rhyme preservation versus semantic fidelity, and later experimental poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins and T. S. Eliot modified metrical and sonic conventions.
Critical reception has ranged from admiration in Renaissance humanist circles—endorsed by figures like Baldassare Castiglione and Erasmus of Rotterdam—to eighteenth-century Neoclassical debates about formality and propriety involving Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson. Romantic appropriation reframed Petrarchan themes of love and subjectivity through poets such as Wordsworth and Shelley, while twentieth-century critics and theorists including T. S. Eliot and Harold Bloom reassessed the sonnet's expressive limits. The Petrarchan sonnet's legacy endures in contemporary poetry workshops, university curricula at institutions like the University of Oxford and Harvard University, and in the continued experimentation by living poets such as Seamus Heaney and Louise Glück, ensuring the form remains a focal point in studies of European and global lyric traditions.
Category:Sonnets