MICHAEL R. G. SPILLER - The Development of the Sonnet

The greatest sonneteer of them all, Francis Petrarch, looking back many years after the death of his beloved Laura upon what he had written with so much art and so much longing, said that

quantio di lei parlai n scrissi.
fu breve stilla dinfiniti abissi.

[Whatever I wrote of her was a small drop out of infinite depths.]

He meant to praise her, not his own sonnets; but spoke perhaps better than he knew, for the sonnet is at once small, and clearly formed, and capable of holding desires from the most tremendous depths. If it were not so, it would not have been used consistently and continuously by the poets of Europe from its invention in southern Italy about 1235, a hundred years before Petrarch saw his Laura, to the present day.

My own task has been to look at the sonnet in Renaissance Britain and, by concentrating upon those sonnet-writers who seem to have done most to extend its powers, show how the self and its desires were imaged. As for what came before, considerations of length and practical use to students of the form have urged me to make choices: Petrarch, of course, is massively and justly there, but as the history of the sonnet does not often take much notice of the century before him I have discussed the sonneteers of the thirteenth century at some length, with lots of examples, all translated, both because that is when the parameters of the sonnet were formed and because the Italian material is widely scattered and difficult to get at for those with little or no knowledge of the language. I have passed over many later sonneteers of great merit, such as the Italian women poets, Lorenzo dei Medici, Michelangelo and others, who are good but of less relevance to the British sonnet; and the excellent work of Walter Monch, Sidney Lee, Janet Scott, Gary Waller and others has made it possible for me to deal lightly with the French sonnet, knowing that sources and themes are accessible to the student elsewhere.

Sonnets are all alike in form; but they can be, and were, used to talk about anything at all, and in critical discussion I have used concepts and ideas freely, as they seemed to have explanatory force. If there is a critical bias, it is against the view of the sonnet as a piece of lyrical autobiographyif that view any longer needs opposing.

Sonnets not in English are taken from available critical editions or anthologies that libraries in Britain are likely to have, and are usually in modern spelling; British sonnets are reproduced either from the original texts or in the original form from a critical edition, with the accepted alterations of i to j and u to v. All translations are my own unless assigned to someone else. For the help I have received from friends, colleagues and above all from my family, I am sincerely grateful; and my students over the years have, I hope, at least taught me what it is I ought to teach them in such a book as this.

MS

And if no peece of Chronicle wee prove,
We'll build in sonnets pretty roomes;
As well a well wrought urne becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombes.

(Zohn Donne, The Canonization)

The sonnet is Donnes original well wrought urnecompact, shapely, highly finished, and able to contain, in concentrated form, almost all that is human. Donne wrote when the sonneteering vogue was at its height in England, in the years 15801610, and was perfectly familiar with the sonnet, singly or in groups, as the commemorator of love, when every Jack could promise his Jill that

though that Laura better limned bee,
Suffice, thou shalt be lov'd as well as shee.

Petrarchs achievement of a sequence of 317 sonnets and forty-nine other poems in praise of his love for one woman, his Laura, though it was imperfectly understood, was the glass of fashion and the mould of form for European sonneteers from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. But love is not the only occupation of the sonnet, nor was it for Petrarch himself; its astonishing success and persistence has to be explained by recourse to rather wider terms.
The sonnet was invented about the year AD 1230, in southern Italy; and by the end of the thirteenth centuryspeaking, than ever before, most contemporary poetseven such apparently wild men as e.e. cummingshave at least one or two sonnets among their lyrics. The existence of hundreds of thousands of sonnets in all the vernaculars of western Europe proves that, for 750 years at least, the sonnet has been challenging and satisfying the poetic imagination.

The sonnet is probably the longest-lived of all poetic forms, and certainly the longest-lived of all prescribed forms