Stephen Fry on Form, Part 10
As I mentioned previously, I’m working through Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled very slowly to absorb as much wisdom as I can about writing poetry. This week’s post covers Chapter 3, Section 10, on the sonnet.
Why does the sonnet get its own section? Well, there’s a lot of history to unpack, two major forms, and countless variant forms. I hadn’t previously realized that the sonnet was originally an Italian form–I always thought it originated in English, though that’s possibly because of the Tom Scott video on why Shakespeare couldn’t have been French. (Though oddly enough, Italian, like French, is a syllable-timed language rather than a stress-timed language, so I’m not entirely clear on how an Italian sonnet could be in iambic pentameter.) The Petrarchan sonnet, though, is different from the Shakespearean sonnet in terms of how the subject is split up, as well as how the rhyme scheme works.
In addition to the two major types of sonnets, there are all sorts of variant forms. Some add lines, some drop lines. Some poets work with linked sonnets or a suite of sonnets. The short version seems to be that there are a lot of sonnet-adjacent forms.
The exercise in this chapter is to write a Petrarchan sonnet and a Shakespearean sonnet on the same topic. I’ve written a few sonnets (Shakespearean), so I’ll add Petrarchan to my to-do list!
Only one more section in the chapter on form, dealing with shaped forms!
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