1. The Italian Sonnet

The Italian Sonnet
Nicolò Crisafi
[email protected]
Defining the sonnet
• Sonnet:
“A 14-line poem normally in hendecasyllables […]
whose rhyme scheme has, in practice, varied widely
despite the traditional assumption that the sonnet is a
fixed form.”
(The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, p. 1167)
• Hendecasyllables: Main meter of Italian poetry, varying in length between
10 and 13 syllables, but always with the last stress on
the 10th syllable.
The word “Sonetto”
“Piccolo suono”
- Aural quality of poetry
- Short, limited, closed form
“Prescribed form”
• “A prescribed form, or closed form as it is sometimes called, is one
whose duration and shape are determined before the poet begins to
write.”
• “Identity is formal, not thematic, as it is in tragedy or ode.”
(Michael Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction, p. 2)
Origins of the sonnet
• Sicily, first half of XIII century.
• Court of Frederick II (reign 1220-1250)
Origins of the sonnet ( 2 )
• Giacomo da Lentini, “il Notaro”
• Rhetoric (lecture 4)
• “From its legal beginnings, the sonnet brought […] the arguing of a
case, through the turn or volta, which allows the sonnet to state more
than one point of view, change its mind or adapt an interlocutor’s.”
(The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, p. 11)
The “Volta”
• Volta: “the turn”
• 14 lines of the traditional sonnet are divided in:
- Octet: made of two quatrains
- Sestet: made of either 2 tercets (Italian), or 1 quatrain + 1 couplet
(Shakespearean)
• “This scheme seems to favour an outward movement of thought in the octet,
followed by a counter movement in the sestet, as is canonically exemplified
by Petrarch’s first sonnet (poem 11)” (Anthology, p. 3)
Petrarch as paragon
Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono
di quei sospiri ond’io nudriva ’l core
in sul mio primo giovenile errore,
quand’era in parte altr’uom da quel ch’i’ sono,
del vario stile in ch’io piango et ragiono,
fra le vane speranze e ’l van dolore,
ove sia chi per prova intenda amore,
spero trovar pietà, nonché perdono.
Ma ben veggio or sí come al popol tutto
favola fui gran tempo, onde sovente
di me medesmo meco mi vergogno;
et del mio vaneggiar vergogna è ’l frutto,
e ’l pentersi, e ’l conoscer chiaramente
che quanto piace al mondo è breve sogno.
Petrarch as paragon
Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono
di quei sospiri ond’io nudriva ’l core
in sul mio primo giovenile errore,
quand’era in parte altr’uom da quel ch’i’ sono,
del vario stile in ch’io piango et ragiono,
fra le vane speranze e ’l van dolore,
ove sia chi per prova intenda amore,
spero trovar pietà, nonché perdono.
Ma ben veggio or sí come al popol tutto
favola fui gran tempo, onde sovente
di me medesmo meco mi vergogno;
et del mio vaneggiar vergogna è ’l frutto,
e ’l pentersi, e ’l conoscer chiaramente
che quanto piace al mondo è breve sogno.
The “sacralization” of the sonnet
• “L’innovazione riduttiva” di Petrarca (1304-1374)
(Gianfranco Contini, ‘Preliminari sulla lingua
del Petrarca’, p. xiv)
•
The sacred:
-“Separated”
- Sacrificing linguistic and thematic scope to
reveal range within
• Petrarchisti as custodians of the sonnet
(mainly XVI century)
Petrarch’s legacy
• In Italy
- Main, “high” tradition
- Comic-realist inversion, “low” tradition (Cecco Angiolieri, G. G. Belli)
• Abroad
-
England: Wyatt, Surrey, Shakespeare
Spain: Lope de Vega
Portugal: Camões
France: Du Bellay, Ronsard
Tradition
• “Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in
following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or
timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be
discouraged.”
• “Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be
inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It
involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which […] involves a
perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence”
(T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the individual talent’)
“Spirito dissacrante”: a brief history
• Della Casa: transgressing the line (enjambement)
• Foscolo: transgressing the octet/sestet division
• Pascoli: heals the rift between the diction of the
“high” and “low” traditions
• XX century poets: Saba, Montale, Valduga vs the
“exact rhyme”
Reading the sonnet
• Poetic practices resist absolute theoretical considerations.
• Prescribed form of 14 hendecasyllabic lines with movement of
thought.
• A vital relation between form and thought: sonnet has to have an
“artistic integrity”.
• Formal limit as the condition-of-possibility of creative freedom
The Italian Sonnet