Elizabethan Sonnets.pptx

Sonnet Discussion

1. Elizabethan Sonnnets Shakesperean and Petrarchan style

2. What is a Sonnnet and Sonnet Cycle A lyric poem consisting of a single stanza of fourteen iambic pentameter lines linked by an intricate rhyme scheme Sonnet sequences, or sonnet cycles, is a series of sonnets are linked together by exploring the varied aspects of a relationship between lovers, or else by indicating a development in the relationship that constitutes a kind of implicit plot.

3. Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences During the early 15 th century, it peeps through the English shore. The great sonneteers of the Elizabethan era were Sir Thomas Wyatt, Earl of Surrey, Philip Sydney, Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare. Sir Thomas Wyatt: - Sir Thomas Wyatt is the innovative Sonnet writer in English literature. His thirty one sonnets are noteworthy. They appeared in Tottel’s Miscellany published on 1557. Ten of these sonnets were the translation from Petrarch. Apart from couplet ending, which Wyatt introduced, it had a Petrarchan model. Even though following Petrarch’s models closely, he remains the pioneer in the realm of English literature in his own art of presentation and imagery.

4. Sonnet A sonnet is a poetic form which originated in the poetry composed at the Court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the Sicilian city of Palermo. The 13 th -century poet and notary Giacomo da Lentini is credited with the sonnet’s invention and the Sicilian School of poets who surrounded him then spread the form to the mainland. The earliest sonnets, however, no longer survive in the original Sicilian language, but only after being translated into Tuscan dialect. The term sonnet is derived from the Italian word sonetto (lit. “little song”, derived from the Latin word sonus , meaning a sound). By the 13 th century it signified a poem of fourteen lines that followed a strict rhyme scheme and structure. According to Christopher Blum, during the Renaissance, the sonnet became the “choice mode of expressing romantic love.” During that period too, the form was taken up in many other European language areas and eventually any subject was considered acceptable for writers of sonnets. Impatience with the set form resulted in many variations over the centuries, including abandonment of the quatorzain limit and even of rhyme altogether in modern times.

5. Italian Sonnet The Italian or Petrarchan sonnet (named after the fourteenthcentury Italian poet Petrarch) falls into two main parts: an octave (eight lines) rhyming abbaabba followed by a sestet (six lines) rhyming cdecde or some variant, such as cdccd

6. Petrarchan sonnet continued..... The sonnet is split in two stanzas: the “octave” or “octet” (of 8 lines) and the “sestet” (of 6 lines), for a total of 14 lines.
The octave typically introduces the theme or problem using a rhyme scheme of ABBAABBA. The sestet provides resolution for the poem and rhymes variously, but usually follows the schemes of CDECDE or CDCCDC.

7. Extra information on Italian sonnet Petrarch’s sonnets were first imitated in England, both in their stanza form and their subject—the hopes and pains of an adoring male lover—by Sir Thomas Wyatt in the early sixteenth century. The Petrarchan form was later used, and for a variety of subjects, by Milton, Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, D. G. Rossetti, and other sonneteers, who sometimes made it technically easier in English (which does not have as many rhyming possibilities as Italian) by introducing a new pair of rhymes in the second four lines of the octave.

8. English Sonnet The Earl of Surrey and other English experimenters in the sixteenth century also developed a stanza form called the English sonnet, or else the Shakespearean sonnet, after its greatest practitioner. This sonnet falls into three quatrains and a concluding couplet: abab cdcd efef gg. There was one notable variant, the Spenserian sonnet, in which Spenser linked each quatrain to the next by a continuing rhyme: abab bebe cdcd ee .

9. Important Elizabethan Sonnnet Sequences John Donne shifted from the hitherto standard subject, sexual love, to a variety of religious themes in his Holy Sonnets, written early in the seventeenth century; and Milton, in the latter part of that century, expanded the range of the sonnet to other matters of serious concern Except for a lapse in the English Neoclassic Period, the sonnet has remained a popular form to the present day and includes among its distinguished practitioners, in the nineteenth century, Wordsworth, Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and more recently Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, and Dylan Thomas.

10. Earl of Surrey Earl of Surrey:-Sir Thomas Wyatt was successfully followed by his contemporary and follower, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. His poem appears along with Wyatt in Tottel’s Miscellany. They are chiefly lyrical and includes a few sonnets, the first of their kind composed in English or Shakespearian mode. This is an arrangement of three quatrains followed by a couplet (ab ab , cd cd , ef ef , gg). In development of English verse Surrey represents a matured metre which Shakespeare copied and know after him.

11. Sir philip Sidney Philip Sydney:-The next remarkable name among the English Sonneteers is Sir Philip Sydney. He was successful in more than one branch of literature. In the development of English sonnet his finest achievement was his Astrophel and Stella which contains a series of 108 sonnets about his own frustrated love for Lady Penelope Rich, the daughter of the Earl of Essex. Like Wyatt his sonnets owe much to Petrarch and Ronsard in tone and style which places Sydney as the greatest Elizabethan sonneteer along with Shakespeare.

12. Michael Drayton Michael D rayton:- Drayton, another sonneteer of Elizabethan age may claim some attention. He is really an inspired poet. Drayton reached the highest level of poetic feeling and expression in Idea a sonnet sequence. It is not known if his  Idea   represents one woman or several or more. The title was borrowed from an extensive sonnet sequence in French called ‘ lidee by Claude the pontoux ’.