I wasn't sure quite what forum to put this in, so feel free to move it if there's a better home for it.
But the eternal question of what, exactly, makes a sonnet has shown its face again, in Kurt's
thread on Met, and I figured that others besides myself might want a playground to discuss the matter further. So, here's your playground. What is a sonnet?
It's a question that interests me because, as you all know, I write a lot of sonnets that don't follow the form's rules in the strictest sense: heterometrical, unrhymed or off-rhymed, or various other divergences. There are Rick's fifteen-line sonnets. William Bronk wrote an entire book of 14-line (loose) blank verse poems, which I would call sonnets. Frederick Goddard Tuckerman wrote a number of sonnets with non-standard rhyme-schemes. And here's a "sonnet" by Michael Spence:
Broken Sonnet: Divorce
I never knew the birds
The way she did –
To me, a cormorant appeared
To be an egret who shed
All his colors for black.
I forget if herons
Will mate for life. Do the males flock,
Or do they fly alone?
I need to find the name
Of one who leaves the land behind,
Making flight his home.
The wind
Will choose which feathers line a nest
And which glide into mist.
Ok, so what makes a sonnet? I think the key is the history of the form. There is a base set of expectations for a sonnet: fourteen lines, iambic pentameter, some kind of rhyme scheme, a sestet/octet construction with a volta in line 9 (possibly interacting with a three quatrain + couplet structure), maybe others. What determines how far you can depart from these base expectations and still be writing a sonnet?
I say that a poem can reasonably claim the title "sonnet" if, in some meaningful way, it plays off these expectations—whether by following them or disrupting them. If you're leveraging the reader's expectations for what a sonnet promises to some poetic end, then you've written a sonnet. Or at least something that could be called a sonnet.
Ok, have at it.