[Martin Elster]

Here are three (quasi?)-sonnets I found in an article about the sonnet form at the Superprof website.

Carol Ann Duffy's Anne Hathaway

A poem which, if you are studying literature in the UK, you will definitely confront is Carol Ann Duffy's Anne Hathaway. Take a read and see what she does with the sonnet form.

The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, cliff-tops, seas
where he would dive for pearls. My lover’s words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
Some nights I dreamed he’d written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer’s hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love –
I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head
as he held me upon that next best bed.

So, what's important here? What is one of those key features of the sonnet that is missing here?

You should have noticed: it is the rhyme scheme! Does the poem rhyme? Only in the final two lines. Other than that, the iambic pentameter is still there, as well as the volta.

Elizabeth Bishop's Sonnet

Caught -- the bubble
in the spirit level,
a creature divided;
and the compass needle
wobbling and wavering,
undecided.
Freed -- the broken
thermometer's mercury
running away;
and the rainbow-bird
from the narrow bevel
of the empty mirror,
flying wherever
it feels like, gay!

Now, how is this a sonnet? Is it a sonnet, and why? The poet, Bishop, clearly intends it to be so, entitling the poem the way she does. What do you think?

E.E. Cummings

here's to opening and upward,to leaf and to sap
and to your(in my arms flowering so new)
self whose eyes smell of the sound of rain

and here's to silent certainly mountains;and to
a disappearing poet of always,snow
and to morning;and to morning's beautiful friend
twilight(and a first dream called ocean)and

let must or if be damned with whomever's afraid
down with ought with because with every brain
which thinks it thinks, nor dares to feel(but up
with joy;and up with laughing and drunkenness)

here's to one undiscoverable guess
of whose mad skill each world of blood is made
(whose fatal songs are moving in the moon

Besides the lack of capital letters and spaces (all of which are intentional), E.E. Cummings is known for his experiments with poetic forms. Can you recognise what he has done here to the form of the sonnet?

Here is the website I got this from:
https://www.superprof.us/blog/differ...es-of-sonnets/

[Julie Steiner]

"On the Sonnet"
John Keats, 1818

If by dull rhymes our English must be chain’d,
And, like Andromeda, the sonnet sweet
Fetter’d, in spite of painéd loveliness;
Let us find out, if we must be constrain’d,
Sandals more interwoven and complete
To fit the naked foot of Poesy;
Let us inspect the lyre, and weigh the stress
Of every chord, and see what may be gain’d
By ear industrious, and attention meet;
Misers of sound and syllable, no less
Than Midas of his coinage, let us be
Jealous of dead leaves in the bay wreath crown;
So, if we may not let the Muse be free,
She will be bound with garlands of her own.

[Mark McDonnell]

This all comes down to the sonnet's mystique as symbolic of "The Tradition", doesn't it? The same mystique that makes some people want to keep the definition narrow makes others want to subvert and broaden it. There is pleasure and necessity in subversion and poets have been at it for as long as there's been a tradition. Poets don't do this stuff with the sestina, or the limerick, or the pantoum –or rather, when they do I imagine people (both subverters and traditionalists) care much less. Walter's recent origami poem probably wouldn't have had the same impact if he hadn't called it a sonnet, because it wouldn't have carried the subversive pleasure of juxtaposing the traditional with the experimental. And nobody would have thought to count the individual surfaces to find that there were 14 and that the shapes were divided into two lots of 8 and 6 (it would still have been very cool though, Walter). There has to be a standard against which the variations are measured though, doesn't there? Or maybe not. Perhaps the ultimate goal is to say "no, there doesn't". I suppose it depends what one is hoping to achieve as an ideal consensus. There seem to be four points of view (and maybe an overarching fifth):

1) "these are sonnets because of x, y and z, but these are definitely not and it's wrong to claim they are, since they lack x and z and what's more they include v and w"
2) "variations of the sonnet are inevitable and perfectly acceptable, but some variations go too far to realistically fit the definition without making a nonsense of the category"
3) "there are traditional sonnet forms, and while some poems certainly differ from the tradition to varying degrees, if the poets say they are sonnets and they have recognisable elements of the form then they should probably be classed as sonnets"
4) "if the poet says their poem is a sonnet then it is, in exactly the same way and to the same degree as the most traditional sonnet, up to its being fit for inclusion in any sonnet competition, and to think otherwise reveals a worrying conservatism"
5) "ultimately, all this concern over categorisation matters much less than the question is it a good poem?"

In other words, it suddenly struck me that this whole discussion is basically the poetry version of the transgender rumpus.

And on that bombshell... I'll get my coat.

[Aaron Novick]

We had a whole big fight and you don't even include my position among five points of view?!?

That's very rude, Mark.

[Mark McDonnell]

I thought I had, Aaron! Summarise it in a user-friendly soundbite and I'll happily edit it in, but it has to fit with my tortured and (who knows?) possibly offensive analogy.

Martin - I love that Duffy poem. It used to be on the English GCSE syllabus so I've had the pleasure of inflicting it on 14 year olds many times.

Annie - thanks for Melanie.

[Martin Elster]

Hi Mark. That Duffy sonnet is remarkably evocative, that’s for sure!

[Aaron Novick]

Mark:

Ultimately, the question is this poem a sonnet? matters far less than the question what is this poem doing?, which will often require recognizing how it responds to the sonnet tradition.


I'm being a bit cheeky in saying you excluded my view, but in general I think judgments of whether a poem is good or bad are secondary to the question of what the poem is doing. (Like, I think the Spence poem I included in the OP is just fine, but not spectacular—what's more interesting to me is that understanding I think requires understanding how it plays with the sonnet form.)

[Mark McDonnell]

Ultimately, the question is this poem a sonnet? matters far less than the question what is this poem doing?, which will often require recognizing how it responds to the sonnet tradition...in general I think judgments of whether a poem is good or bad are secondary to the question of what the poem is doing. (Like, I think the Spence poem I included in the OP is just fine, but not spectacular—what's more interesting to me is that understanding I think requires understanding how it plays with the sonnet form.)

Right. Hmm. So putting aside whether its an interesting question, it could be argued that your answer to "is this a sonnet?" is, in a sense, "no". Because you're kind of saying that that the chief interest of the poem (more than its poetic merits) is as a response to, or commentary on, the sonnet. That its main function is as an academic exercise 'about' the sonnet, rather than a sonnet itself. Do you think all contemporary sonnets have to necessarily be "responding to" or "doing something with" the sonnet tradition, or is it possible to just use the sonnet form "unselfconsciously" for want of a better word? If anything, it's the former attitude that would suggest the form is dead, a museum piece only fit to be interrogated with a postmodern eye.

I think judgments of whether a poem is good or bad are secondary to the question of what the poem is doing.

This is a place where I think we differ. I know that judging quality is ultimately impossible, but I'm much more fascinated by the project of defining this indefinable, rather than the somewhat dry academic exercise of interrogating a poem's place in relation to all the poems that have preceded it (though this can be interesting). I'm kind of fascinated by the thought that a brilliant poem could be written by someone who had read maybe four poems in their life.

Apologies if I've managed to respond to something you haven't said again.

[Clive Watkins]

This might amuse — or annoy — some: http://www.fridaycircle.uottawa.ca/f...y-preface.html.

Follow the links at the foot of the page for numerous examples.

Clive

[Aaron Novick]

Apology accepted, Mark, since once again my reply is going to take the form of a litany of denials that I said what you think I said.

I don't think it could be argued that my answer to "is this a sonnet?" is "no"—some poems are clearly sonnets, some poems are clearly not sonnets, and then there's a vast middle range of poems that are somewhere in between, making use of some but not all traditional aspects of sonnets. And in that middle range, which includes poems like Bronk's 14-line blank verse poems, Spence's "Broken Sonnet", Rick's 15-line sonnets, etc., I think the question "is it a sonnet?" is boring (I'm inclined to say "yes" in each case mentioned, if pressed, but don't think much turns on this). The question "how does it work" is more interesting.

I am not to any extent saying that the chief interest of a sonnet is as an academic commentary on the sonnet form. (Though, if a poem does, in some way, comment on the sonnet form, I don't see how addressing this is separable from assessing its poetic merits.) The chief interest of a poem lies in (a) what it is trying to do, (b) how it goes about doing it, (c) whether it does so effectively, (d) whether it is worth doing at all. (Judgments of quality are of secondary interest because they are crude; they compress information about these four distinct questions.) All I have said is that, in some cases, understanding how a poem makes use of the sonnet tradition is important to addressing that. For instance, while the Spence poem is certainly understandable on its own, when you are aware of sonnet conventions, and especially the use of the sonnet for earnest love poems, then you start to see why a broken relationship might demand a "broken sonnet". If you don't see that, you're missing something in Spence's poem. That's not "academic", and it doesn't require a "postmodern eye", and it certainly doesn't suggest that the sonnet form is a "museum piece."

Another example. Here's Chaucer:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye,
So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages,
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages...

And here's Eliot:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Eliot is clearly responding to Chaucer. Does Eliot's use of Chaucer suggest that Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is a museum piece? Does it suggest it's something we can only look at with a postmodern eye? Is the primary interest of Eliot's poem its value as an academic commentary on Chaucer, apart from its poetic merits? I presume you see immediately that the answer to each question is "no", that it would be ridiculous to go from "Eliot is responding to Chaucer, and your understanding of Eliot's poem will be deepened by recognizing this" to any of those conclusions. So then you see why your interpretation of what I'm saying does not remotely follow from my point that understanding a sonnet or sonnet-ish poem will often involve understanding how it fits within the sonnet tradition.

Yes, of course someone could write a sonnet unselfconsciously. To a great extent, every poem is written unselfconsciously, in the sense that no author ever intends the full array of effects on readers that their work ultimately has. (Nabokov tried his damnedest, but...) This is true even if we limit ourselves to reasonable responses. So someone could absolutely write a sonnet without knowing much at all about the sonnet tradition. If one's reading of it was nonetheless was enriched by how it interacts with expectations set by that tradition, it would certainly help to deepen that reading by trying to understand those interactions explicitly. I'm not saying author intent is irrelevant, but it's not the be all and end all: how a poem works and how its author intended it to work are two distinct, if related, questions.

All I've been saying, ultimately, is that poetry is more rewarding when you understand how it works. Actively striving to deepen your connection to a poem by understanding its nooks and crannies enriches the experience. It's not an "academic exercise". If I've been emphasizing understanding how it responds to tradition, that's because that's what this thread is about, not because it's primary or always of paramount importance. I'm not saying that one must always do so to understand a poem, or that doing so is always illuminating. If you think I have, it is perhaps because you have extracted my claims from their context of utterance.