English Romantic sonnets

The sonnet was a popular form of poetry during the Romantic period: William Wordsworth wrote 523, John Keats 67, Samuel Taylor Coleridge 48, and Percy Bysshe Shelley 18. But in the opinion of Lord Byron sonnets were “the most puling, petrifying, stupidly platonic compositions”, at least as a vehicle for love poetry, and he wrote no more than five.

Variations of both the Petrarchan sonnet and the Shakespearean sonnet were employed by the Romantic poets in the wake of the late 18th century revivalists of the form, who had applied the sonnet to a wider variety of subjects than in previous centuries. Experiments in making the sonnet more expressive and more adaptable still, begun by the later Romantic poets, were continued after their time.

Background

Main article: Sonnet § English

The sonnet had been adopted into English poetry during Tudor times, notably by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who took Petrarch as their model and translated or adapted several of his sonnets into English. The form was taken up by a host of other poets over the next century, for the most part composing long amatory sequences, although at the end of this period John Milton had demonstrated the sonnet’s adaptability to a much wider range of subject matter. After him, scarcely any sonnets were written until the form’s revival during the second half of the 18th century. For that generation, Milton's example was the one generally followed, although the long history of the Italian sonnet was not forgotten, especially among women writers. Charlotte Smith incorporated a few translations from Petrarch among her Elegiac Sonnets, while Anna Seward's sonnet "Petrarch to Vaucluse" is an imitation written in the poet's name.

At the start of the 19th century,Capel Lofft expressed his sense of the importance of the sonnet's history to the new generation of English poets. In the long preface to his idiosyncratic Laura, or an anthology of sonnets (on the Petrarchan model) and elegiac quatorzains (London 1814), the thesis is developed that beyond the sonnet's Sicilian origin lies the system of musical notation developed by the mediaeval Guido of Arezzo, and before that the musical arrangement of the Greek ode. In Italy (as in England), the sonnet had gone through periods of decline and renewal and Milton was the fittest model for the English revival. The young Milton had learned the mature Italian style while travelling in Italy and conversing on equal terms with its writers (as well as writing five sonnets in Italian as well). Milton's sonnets deal with both personal and contemporary issues and in their organisation are reminiscent of the Horatian ode. In form they are modelled on Petrarch's, however, which to Capel Lofft is more legitimate than the Shakespearean quatorzain that closes in a couplet.

The age of sensibility

The period of literary transition between Augustan poetry and Romantic poetry has sometimes been described as the age of sensibility. During this time poets looked to the past for different literary models, subjects, and even diction. Personal feelings were emphasised, although these were often of a melancholy or sentimental cast. This was the period when the sonnet was rediscovered and developed, not only by younger men associated with the universities but also by an emerging generation of female writers, as an ideal vehicle for the lyrical expression of emotion. The revival was not without stylistic skirmishes, however. Charlotte Smith's doleful Elegiac Sonnets were dismissed by Anna Seward as "everlasting lamentables" and "hackneyed scraps of dismality". Coleridge parodied the styles of various contemporary writers in three "Sonnets attempted in the[ir] manner" (published under the name of Nehemiah Higginbottom in 1797); and the youthful Byron addressed mocking quatrains "To the author of a sonnet beginning 'Sad is my verse, you say, and yet no tear'".

There was also disagreement over which form of the sonnet was the best model to follow. That chosen by Charlotte Smith and her followers was the Shakespearean sonnet. Anna Seward and Mary Robinson, on the other hand, championed the Petrarchan sonnet as the only 'legitimate' form. In the preface to her sequence Sappho and Phaon: in a series of legitimate sonnets (1796), Robinson denounced the undisciplined effusions filling the literary reviews as "non-descript ephemera from the heated brains of self-important poetasters". Seward, on her side, appealed to the critical dictates of Boileau. His L'Art poétique (1674) had been translated by William Soame and published with John Dryden's revisions in 1683 as The Art of Poetry. There Apollo Musagetes, god of poetry, institutes strict measures for the writing of sonnets, forbidding any redundancy, in order to confound contemporary "Scriblers":

A faultless Sonnet, finish’d thus, would be

Worth tedious volumes of loose Poetry.

In her distillation of the same passage, Seward similarly recommends restraint and discipline over the "trite ideas thrown into loose verse" that illegitimately pass as poetry.

Wordsworth's sonnet "Nuns fret not at their Convent’s narrow room" echoes the same reasoning. Written after the poet's adoption of the Miltonic form of the sonnet (based on Petrarch’s), it reasons that the form's restriction "no prison is", but instead a solace for those "who have felt the weight of too much liberty". Wordsworth's earliest sonnet had been the lachrymose "On seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress" (1787). Convinced now of the wider possibilities and subject matter of the Miltonic example, the poetic lead he gave after 1802 was "in many ways a deliberate erasure of the sonnet of Sensibility", setting the style for the new century.

Romantic sonnets

In Wordsworth's opinion, poets should write sonnets to add variety to their work and keep them out of the trap of routine. John Clare, too, believed the sonnet gave him scope to annotate the natural themes that took his fancy in a disciplined way. A later editor has surmised that its compact form represented for him "a kind of self-discipline, forcing him to concentrate and obtain his effects with economy, where in other poems he allowed himself to wander a little aimlessly". But younger poets meanwhile took advantage of the form's restriction to engage in friendly competition. At the end of 1816, John Keats and Leigh Hunt set themselves the task of each writing a sonnet "On the Grasshopper and Cricket" in a quarter of an hour. In the following year Shelley and Horace Smith competed together after visiting the British Museum, from which sonnets on Ozymandias resulted. And early in 1818, Shelley, Keats and Hunt took "The Nile" as their subject for sonnets published separately soon after.

But the sonnet form presented a different kind of challenge to the older Romantic authors, who are usually noted for their strong "I" assertion in lyric narratives. Coleridge confessed of his own performance that "The sonnet has ever been a favourite species of composition with me; but I am conscious that I have not succeeded in it".

Nature

Although the Romantics wrote sonnets about a variety of subjects, one of the most common was nature. Petrarch, indeed, had included descriptions of nature in his sonnets, as did Shakespeare, this was generally incidental to the main theme relating to love or as part of an analogy. For the Romantics, however, Nature is a master theme. Many of the sonnets and poems of the era describe the calm, beauty, power or sublimity of the natural scene and Nature is often personified to emphasise the closeness in the human relationship to it. For example, the analogy between man and nature is drawn in Keats' "The Human Seasons", where the changes in the seasons are compared with the stages of human life.

A draft of Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Form

The two classic forms that the Romantics used the most were the Petrarchan sonnet and the Shakespearean sonnet. The Petrarchan or Italian form usually follows a rhyme scheme of ABBA ABBA CDE CDE. The poem is usually divided into two sections with the first eight lines, an octave, and the last six, a sestet. There is usually a turn in the poem around line nine. The Shakespearean form has a rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. The end rhyming couplet is often used to turn the idea that has been building through the poem.

The Romantics played with these forms. Since the general topic and focus of the sonnet shifted in this era, it makes sense that the form would also change to mirror the content. A sonnet like Shelley’s Ozymandias uses neither a complete Shakespearian nor Petrarchan rhyme scheme. The pattern of ab ab ac dc ed ef ef, is no less a sonnet than those of conventional patterns. The movement away from set structures could be to mirror the feelings of detachment in the poem.

The ode had been a favorite form for all the Romantics because its irregular lineation adapted in many ways to the speaker and subject. However, Shelley's adaptation into his "Ode to the West Wind" of the sonnet form gave him the best of both worlds, allowing him emotional and grammatical shifts that typify the blowing wind while holding its energy in check by the discipline of a regular form. In this case there is a double adaptation, using the terza rima pattern of successive tercets brought to a disciplined close in a rhyming couplet: ABA BCB CDC DED EE; this novel form is then deployed in the five sonnet-like stanzas of which the poem is constructed.