Editing Sonnet (section)

==Germanic languages==

===English===
====Tudor and Stuart period====

[[Sir Thomas Wyatt]] and [[Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey]], have been described as "the first English Petrarchans" from their pioneering the sonnet form in English. In addition, some 25 of Wyatt's poems are dependent on Petrarch, either as translations or imitations, while, of Surrey's five, three of them are translations and two imitations.<ref>Patricia Thomson, ''Sir Thomas Wyatt and his Background'', Routledge, 1964, pp. 166–208.</ref> In one instance, both poets translated the same poem, ''Rime'' 140.<ref>Bruce A. McMenomy, [https://www.dorthonion.com/drmcm/english_lit/supplementary/petrarch.html "Petrarch, Rime 140: Two translations by Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey".]</ref> From these examples, as elsewhere in their prosodic practice, a difference between their style can be observed. Wyatt's verse metre, though in general decasyllabic, is irregular and proceeds by way of significantly stressed phrasal units.<ref>Peter Groves, [https://www.academia.edu/11950890/Finding_his_Feet_Wyatt_and_the_Founding_of_English_Pentameter "Finding his Feet: Wyatt and the Founding of English Pentameter"], ''Versification: An Electronic Journal of Literary Prosody'' 4 (2005).</ref> But, in addition, Wyatt's sonnets are generally closer in construction to those of Petrarch.

Prosodically, Surrey is more adept at composing in [[iambic pentameter]] and his sonnets are written in what has come to be known anachronistically as [[Shakespeare's sonnets#Form and structure of the sonnets|Shakespearean measure]].<ref>Thomson 1964, pp. 174–79.</ref> This version of the sonnet form, characterised by three alternately rhymed quatrains terminating in a final couplet (ABAB CDCD, EFEF, GG), became the favourite during [[Elizabethan literature|Elizabethan times]], when it was widely used. It was particularly so in whole series of [[Sonnet sequence#List of English sonnet sequences|amatory sequences]], beginning with Sir [[Philip Sidney]]'s ''[[Astrophel and Stella]]'' (1591) and continuing over a period of two decades. About four thousand sonnets were composed during this time.<ref>''The Art of the Sonnet'', 2010, p. 12.</ref> However, with such a volume, much there that was conventional and repetitious came to be viewed with a sceptical eye. [[Sir John Davies]] mocked these in a series of nine "gulling sonnets"<ref>[https://www.pseudopodium.org/repress/parody/davies-gulling-sonnets.html Gulling Sonnets] by Mr Davyes.</ref> and [[William Shakespeare]] was also to dismiss some of them in his [[Sonnet 130]], "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun".

[[File:Sonnets1609titlepage.jpg|thumb|upright=0.9|The title page of the first edition of [[Shakespeare]]'s ''Sonnets'']]
[[Shakespeare's sonnets|Shakespeare's sequence of 154 sonnets]] departs from the norm in addressing more than one person in its course, male as well as female. In addition, other sonnets by him were incorporated into some of his plays. Another exception at this time was the form used in [[Spenserian sonnet|Edmund Spenser's ''Amoretti'']], which has the interlaced rhyme scheme ABAB BCBC CDCD EE. And soon after, in the following century, [[John Donne]] adapted the emerging Baroque style to the new subject matter of his series of ''[[Holy Sonnets]]''.

[[John Milton]]'s sonnets constitute a special case and demonstrate another stylistic transition. Two youthful examples in English and five in Italian are Petrarchan in spirit. But the seventeen sonnets of his maturity address personal and political themes. It has been observed of their intimate tone, and the way the sense overrides the volta within the poem in some cases, that Milton is here adapting the sonnet form to that of the [[Odes (Horace)|Horatian ode]].<ref>John H. Finley, Jr., "Milton and Horace: A Study of Milton's Sonnets", ''Harvard Studies in Classical Philology'', Vol. 48 (1937), [https://www.jstor.org/stable/310690?refreqid=excelsior%3A55b1e11b22c4e368c0ac5f49332ef7c3&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contentsnow=1&refreqid=excelsior%3A18772fefad4336e1c8f88b1f635de51a&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents pp. 29–73.]</ref> He also seems to have been the first to introduce an Italian variation of the form, the [[caudate sonnet]], into English in his prolongation of "On the New Forcers of Conscience Under the Long Parliament".<ref>"Caudate sonnet", ''The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics'', ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan, Princeton University Press, 1993.</ref>

====18th–19th centuries====
{{See also|Romantic sonnets}}
The fashion for the sonnet went out with the [[English Restoration|Restoration]], and hardly any were written between 1670 and the second half of the 18th century. Amongst the first to revive the form was [[Thomas Warton]], who took Milton for his model. Around him at Oxford were grouped those associated with him in this revival, including [[John Codrington Bampfylde]], [[Thomas Russell (poet)|Thomas Russell]], [[Thomas Warwick]] and [[Henry Headley]], some of whom published small collections of sonnets alone.<ref>Bethan Roberts, ''Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet'', OUP 2019, [https://books.google.com/books?id=AC27DwAAQBAJ&q=poem+%22Thomas+Warwick%22 p.19]</ref>  Many women, too, now took up the sonnet form, in particular [[Charlotte Smith (writer)|Charlotte Smith]], whose lachrymose ''Elegiac Sonnets'' (1784 onwards) are credited with helping create the 'school of sensibility' characteristic of the time.<ref>''Cambridge History of English Literature'' (2005), [https://books.google.com/books?id=UtmE5JzCOFAC&dq=sensibility+%22Elegaic+sonnets%22&pg=PA231 p.231]</ref> [[William Lisle Bowles]] was also a close follower, but the success of both stirred up resistance in the poetic politics of the time.

[[William Beckford (novelist)|William Beckford]] parodied Smith's melancholy manner and archaic diction in an "Elegiac sonnet to a mopstick".<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.poetryexplorer.net/poem.php?id=10037421|title=Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, ELEGIAC SONNET TO A MOPSTICK, by WILLIAM BECKFORD|website=www.poetryexplorer.net}}</ref> In the preface to his 1796 collection ''Poems on Various Subjects'', [[Samuel Taylor Coleridge]] commented of his series of "Effusions" that "I was fearful that the title "Sonnet" might have reminded my reader of the Poems of the Rev. W. L. Bowles – a comparison with whom would have sunk me below that mediocrity, on the surface of which I am at present enabled to float".<ref>S. T. Coleridge, ''Poems'', London 1796, [https://books.google.com/books?id=n61aAAAAcAAJ&q=Coleridge+%22Poems+on+Various+Subjects%22 p.x]</ref> There were formal objections too. Where most of the early revivalists had used Milton's sonnets as the model for theirs, Smith and Bowles had preferred the Shakespearean form.  This led to [[Mary Robinson (poet)|Mary Robinson]]'s fighting preface to her sequence ''Sappho and Phaon'', in which she asserted the legitimacy of the Petrarchan form as used by Milton over "the non-descript ephemera from the heated brains of self-important poetasters" that pass as sonnets in the literary reviews of her day.<ref>Mary Robinson, ''Sappho and Phaon: in a series of legitimate sonnets, with thoughts on poetical subjects'', London 1796, [https://books.google.com/books?id=7K5YAAAAcAAJ&dq=poetasters+%22Sappho+and+Phaon%22&pg=PA10 p.10]</ref>

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 [[Pindar#Structure|Greek ode]].<ref>Lofft 1814, [https://books.google.com/books?id=hhouAQAAIAAJ pp.iii-ix]</ref> The young Milton, he noted, 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).<ref>Lofft 1814, pp. cxli-clv</ref> In form, his are modelled on Petrarch's and, dealing as they do with both personal and contemporary issues, are reminiscent in their organisation of the [[Odes (Horace)|Horatian ode]].<ref>John H. Finley, Jr., "Milton and Horace: A Study of Milton's Sonnets", ''Harvard Studies in Classical Philology'' Vol. 48 (1937), [https://www.jstor.org/stable/310690?refreqid=excelsior%3A55b1e11b22c4e368c0ac5f49332ef7c3&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contentsnow=1&refreqid=excelsior%3A18772fefad4336e1c8f88b1f635de51a&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents pp. 29-73]</ref> 

Impressed too by Milton's sonnets, Wordsworth described the form as having "an energetic and varied flow of sound, crowding into narrow room more of the combined effect of rhyme and blank verse, than can be done by any other kind of verse I know of".<ref>Jay Curlin, "Chaos in the Convent's Narrow Room: Milton and the Sonnet", [https://scholarlycommons.obu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1077&context=articles Scholarly Commons, 1993]</ref> In that its compression could be adapted to a great variety of themes, he eventually wrote some 523 sonnets which were to exert a powerful stylistic influence throughout the first half of the 19th century.<ref>George Sanderlin, "The Influence of Milton and Wordsworth on the Early Victorians", ELH 5.3 (1938), [https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2871590.pdf pp.225–251]</ref> Part of his appeal to others was the way in which he used the sonnet as a focus for new subject matter, frequently in sequences. From his series on the River Duddon<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://archive.org/details/riverduddonserie00word|title=The River Duddon : a series of sonnets : Vaudracour and Julia: and other poems. To which is annexed, a topographical description of the country of the lakes, in the north of England|first=William|last=Wordsworth|date=17 April 1820|publisher=London : Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown|via=Internet Archive}}</ref> sprang reflections on any number of regional natural features; his travel tour effusions, though not always confined to sonnet form,<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.wordsworthcentre.co.uk/Cornell/pages/cup_ssip.htm|title=Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1820-1845, by William Wordsworth, ed. Geoffrey Jackson|website=www.wordsworthcentre.co.uk}}</ref> found many imitators. What eventually became three series of ''Ecclesiastical Sonnets''<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47143/47143-h/47143-h.htm|title=The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Poetical Works Of William Wordsworth (7 of 8), by William Wordsworth.|website=www.gutenberg.org}}</ref> started a vogue for sonnets on religious and devotional themes.<ref>Sanderlin 1938, pp.229–35</ref> Milton's predilection for political themes, continuing through Wordsworth's "Sonnets dedicated to liberty and order", now became an example for contemporaries too. Barely had the process begun, however, before a sceptical alarmist in ''[[The New Monthly Magazine]]'' for 1821 was diagnosing "sonnettomania" as a new sickness akin to "the bite of a rabid animal".<ref>Jennifer Ann Wagner, ''A Moment's Monument: Revisionary Poetics and the Nineteenth-century English Sonnet'', Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1996, [https://books.google.com/books?id=PZYkimc1bZUC   p.116]</ref>

Another arm of the propaganda on behalf of the sonnet in [[English Romantic sonnets|Romantic times]] was the reflexive strategy of recommending it in sonnet form as a demonstration of its possibility of variation. In Wordsworth's "Nuns fret not at their narrow room" (1807),<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.sonnets.org/wordsworth.htm#100|title=William Wordsworth|website=www.sonnets.org}}</ref> the volta comes after the seventh line, dividing the poem into two equal parts. Keats makes use of frequent enjambment in "If by dull rhymes our English must be chained" (1816)<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.sonnets.org/keats.htm#010|title=John Keats|website=www.sonnets.org}}</ref> and divides its sense units into four tercets and a couplet. What Keats is recommending there is the more intricate rhyming system A B C |A B D |C A B |C D E| D E that he demonstrates in its course as a means of giving the form greater breathing room. Wordsworth later accomplishes this in "Scorn not the Sonnet" (1827),<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45547/scorn-not-the-sonnet|title=Poetry Foundation|date=26 April 2024 }}</ref> which is without midway division, and where enjambment is so managed that the sense overrides from line to line in an ode-like movement. With the similar aim of freeing the form from its fetters, [[Matthew Arnold]] turns his "Austerity of poetry" (1867)<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/matthew-arnold/austerity-of-poetry/|title=Austerity of Poetry|date=16 June 2022|website=Collection at Bartleby.com}}</ref> into a narrative carried forward over an enjambed eighth line to a conclusion that is limited to the final three lines.

[[File: Rossetti_on_sonnet,_1880.jpg|thumb|upright=1.05|D. G. Rossetti's illuminated description of the sonnet, 1880]]
By the time the second half of the 19th century was reached, sonnets become chiefly interesting for their publication in long sequences. It was during this period that attempts to renew the form were continually being made. [[Elizabeth Barrett Browning]]'s autobiographical ''[[Sonnets from the Portuguese]]'' (1845–50),<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2002/2002-h/2002-h.htm|title=Sonnets from the Portuguese, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning|website=www.gutenberg.org}}</ref> for example, is described as the first depiction of a successful courtship since Elizabethan times.<ref>''The art of the sonnet'', Harvard University Press, 2010, [https://books.google.com/books?id=WduHxc6iYp4C&dq=nineteenth+century+sonnets&pg=PA1 p.18]</ref> It comprises 44 sonnets of dramatised first person narrative, the enjambed lines in which frequently avoid resting at the volta.  Through this means the work is distinguished by "the flexibility and control with which the verse bends to the argument and to the rhythms of thought and speech".<ref>Dorothy Mermin, "The Female Poet and the Embarrassed Reader: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets From the Portuguese", ELH 48.2 (Johns Hopkins University, 1981), [https://www.jstor.org/stable/2872976 p.356]</ref>

That sequence was followed in 1862 by [[George Meredith]]'s [[Modern Love (poetry collection)|''Modern Love'']],<ref>Google Books, [https://books.google.com/books?id=MwFdAAAAcAAJ&q=Meredith+%22Modern+Love%22 pp.31–82]</ref> based in part on the breakdown of his first marriage. It employs a 16-line form, described as (and working like) a sonnet, linking together the work's fifty narrative episodes. Essentially the stanza is made up of four quatrains of [[enclosed rhyme]], rhythmically driven forward over these divisions so as to allow a greater syntactical complexity "more readily associated with the realist novel than with lyric poetry".<ref>Stephen Regan, "The Victorian Sonnet, from George Meredith to Gerard Manley Hopkins", ''The Yearbook of English Studies'' 36.2 (2006), [https://www.jstor.org/stable/20479240?read-now=1&refreqid=excelsior%3A9e88d78a21e98fd8aacfa2cde4abcca1&seq=7#page_scan_tab_contents p.23]</ref> As other work by both the writers above demonstrates, they were capable of more straightforward fictions. In adapting the sonnet to the narrative mode, the main interest for them is in overcoming the technical challenge that they set themselves and proving the new possibilities of the form in which they are working.

Where the first quatrain in ''Sonnets from the Portuguese'' began with a reminiscence of lines from a pastoral of [[Theocritus]], Edward Cracroft Lefroy (1855–1891) responded by reaching beyond the narrative mode towards the dramatic in the thirty adaptations from the Greek of his ''Echoes from Theocritus'' (1885, reprint 1922).<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://archive.org/details/EchoesFromTheocritvsEdwardCracroftLefroy|title=Echoes From Theocritus by Edward Cracroft Lefroy and John Austen|first=Edward Cracroft|last=Lefroy|date=17 April 1922|via=Internet Archive}}</ref> Beyond this, though the idea of arranging such material in a sequence was original to Lefroy, [[Thomas Warwick]] had anticipated the approach a century before in his sonnet "From [[Bacchylides]]", equally based on a fragment of an ancient Greek author. On the other hand, [[Eugene Lee-Hamilton]]'s exploration of the sonnet's dramatic possibilities was through creating historical monologues in his hundred ''Imaginary Sonnets'' (1888),<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=J7QwAQAAMAAJ|title=Imaginary Sonnets|first=Eugene|last=Lee-Hamilton|date=17 April 1888|publisher=E. Stock|via=Google Books}}</ref> based on episodes chosen from the seven centuries between 1120 – 1820. Neither sequence was anywhere the equal of those of Barrett Browning or Meredith,<ref>''The Art of the Sonnet'', Harvard University 2016, [https://books.google.com/books?id=WduHxc6iYp4C Introduction, p.20]</ref> but they illustrate a contemporary urge to make new a form that was fast running out of steam.

====20th century====
As part of his attempted renewal of poetic prosody, [[Gerard Manley Hopkins]] had applied his experimental [[sprung rhythm]] to the composition of the sonnet, amplifying the number of unstressed syllables within a five- (or occasionally six-) stressed line – as in the rhetorical "[[The Windhover]]", for example. He also introduced variations in the proportions of the sonnet, from the 10{{frac|1|2}} lines of the [[curtal sonnet]] "[[Pied Beauty]]" to the amplified 24-line [[caudate sonnet]] "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire". Though they were written in the later Victorian era, the poems remained virtually unknown until they were published in 1918.<ref>Norman White, "Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844–1889)", ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford University Press.</ref>

The undergraduate [[W. H. Auden]] is sometimes credited with dispensing with rhyme altogether in "The Secret Agent".<ref>Robert E. Bjork, W. H. Auden's "The Secret Agent", ''ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews'', [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0895769X.2020.1833702 8 November, 2020]</ref> He went on to write many conventional sonnets later, including two long sequences during the time of international crisis: [[Journey to a War|"In Time of War"]] (1939) and [[The Double Man (book)|"The Quest"]] (1940), in which "the use of geography and landscape to symbolise spiritual and mental states" owes something to the earlier example of [[Rainer Maria Rilke|Rilke]].<ref>R. G. Cox, "The Poetry of W. H. Auden", ''The Modern Age''( Volume 7 of the ''Pelican Guide to English Literature'' (1961), pp. 386-7</ref> Sequences by some other poets have been more experimental and looser in form, of which a radical example was "Altarwise by owl-light" (1935), ten irregular and barely rhyming quatorzains by [[Dylan Thomas]] in his most opaque manner.<ref>Julian Scutts, ''A Defence of Wandering and Poetry'' (2019), [https://books.google.com/books?id=5t2rDwAAQBAJ&dq=%22altarwise+by+owl+light%22&pg=PA154 "A critical survey of the linguistic features of Altarwise by Owl-light], pp. 155ff</ref> 

In 1978 two later innovatory sequences were published at a period when it was considered that "the sonnet seems to want to lie fallow, exhausted", in the words of one commentator.<ref>[[D. M. Black]], quoted in ''Agenda'' 26.2, Summer 1998, p.49</ref> [[Peter Dale (poet)|Peter Dale]]'s book-length ''One Another'' contains a dialogue of some sixty sonnets in which the variety of rhyming methods are as diverse as the emotions expressed between the speakers there.<ref>[https://waywiser-press.com/product/one-another The Waywiser Press], revised edition 2002</ref> At the same time, [[Geoffrey Hill]]'s "An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England" appeared in ''Tenebrae'' (1978), where the challenging thirteen poems of the sequence employ half-rhyme and generally ignore the volta.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48462/an-apology-for-the-revival-of-christian-architecture-in-england|title=Poetry Foundation|date=26 April 2024 }}</ref> [[Seamus Heaney]] also wrote two sequences during this period: the personal "Glanmore Sonnets" in [[Field Work (poetry collection)|''Field Work'']] (1975);<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.brinkerhoffpoetry.org/poems/glanmore-sonnets|title=Seamus Heaney - "Glanmore Sonnets"|website=www.brinkerhoffpoetry.org}}</ref> and the more freely constructed elegiac sonnets of  "Clearances" in  ''[[The Haw Lantern]]'' (1987).<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57042/clearances|title=Clearances by Seamus Heaney|first=Poetry|last=Foundation|date=17 April 2024|website=Poetry Foundation}}</ref>

===In North America===
====USA====
The earliest American sonnet is [[David Humphreys (soldier)|David Humphreys]]'s<ref>{{cite encyclopedia |editor1-last=Greene |editor1-first=Roland |editor2-last=Cushman |editor2-first=Stephen |editor3-last=Cavanagh |editor3-first=Clare |editor4-last=Ramazani |editor4-first=Jahan |editor5-last=Rouzer |editor5-first=Paul |editor1-link=Roland Greene |display-editors=2 |author1-last=Brogan |author1-first=T.V.F. |author2-last=Zillman |author2-first=L.J. |author3-last=Scott |author3-first=C.|author4-last=Lewin |author4-first=J. |title=Sonnet |pages=1318–1321 |date=2012 |encyclopedia=The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics |edition=Fourth |location=Princeton, NJ |publisher=Princeton University Press |isbn=978-0-691-13334-8 |oclc=908736323}} (p. 1320)</ref> 1776 sonnet "Addressed to my Friends at Yale College, on my Leaving them to join the Army".<ref>{{cite web |title=David Humphreys |url=https://allpoetry.com/David-Humphreys}}</ref> The sonnet form was used widely thereafter, including by [[William Lloyd Garrison]] and [[William Cullen Bryant]].<ref name="ugapress.org">{{Cite web|url=https://www.ugapress.org/book/9780820357645/forms-of-contention/|title = Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition}}</ref> Later, [[Henry Wadsworth Longfellow]] and others followed suit.<ref>Lewis Sterner, [http://www.sonnets.org/sterner.htm ''The Sonnet in American Literature'' (1930)]</ref> His were characterised by a "purple richness of diction" and by their use of material images to illustrate niceties of thought and emotion.<ref>''The book of the sonnet'', ed. by Leigh Hunt and S. Adams (1866), p.102</ref> He also translated several sonnets, including seven by [[Michelangelo]].<ref>{{cite web| url = http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?3965-Sonnets-of-Michelangelo| title = Online Literature}}</ref> Later on, among [[Emma Lazarus]]' many sonnets, perhaps the best-known is "[[The New Colossus]]" of 1883,<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.sonnets.org/lazarus.htm|title=Emma Lazarus|website=www.sonnets.org}}</ref> which celebrates the [[Statue of Liberty]] and its role in welcoming immigrants to the New World.

In the 19th century, sonnets written by American poets began to be anthologised as such. They were included in a separate section in Leigh Hunt and S. Adams' ''The Book of the Sonnet'' (London and Boston, 1867), which included an essay by Adams on "American Sonnets and Sonneteers" and a section devoted only to sonnets by American women.<ref>''The Book of the Sonnet'', [https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b250912&view=1up&seq=11&skin=2021 vol.1] and [https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924064948346&view=1up&seq=16&skin=2021 vol.2], Hathi Trust</ref> Later came [[William Sharp (writer)|William Sharp]]'s anthology of ''American Sonnets'' (1889)<ref>{{cite web| url = https://archive.org/details/americansonnets00shar/page/n9/mode/2up| title = Internet Archive| year = 1889}}</ref> and Charles H. Crandall's ''Representative sonnets by American poets, with an essay on the sonnet, its nature and history'' ([[Houghton Mifflin & Co.]], 1890). The essay also surveyed the whole history of the sonnet, including English examples and European examples in translation, in order to contextualise the American achievement.<ref>''Representative sonnets by American poets'', [https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044013711908&view=1up&seq=17&skin=2021 Hathi Trust]</ref>

Recent scholarship has recovered many [[African American]] sonnets that were not anthologised in standard American poetry volumes. Important nineteenth and early twentieth century writers have included [[Paul Laurence Dunbar]], [[Countee Cullen]], [[Sterling A. Brown]], and Jamaican-born [[Claude McKay]].<ref>{{cite web| url = https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2019/01/sonnets-and-seeds-by-hollis-robbins.html| title = Best American Poetry}}</ref> Some of their sonnets were personal responses to experience of displacement and racial prejudice. Cullen’s "At the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem" (1927), for example, suggests a parallel between the history of his race and that of the Jewish [[diaspora]].<ref>''The Art of the Sonnet'', pp. 273-76]</ref> And McKay's sonnets of 1921 respond defiantly to the deadly [[Red Summer]] riots two years before.<ref>''The Art of the Sonnet'', pp. 250-52]</ref> There were also several African American women poets who won prizes for volumes that included sonnets, including [[Margaret Walker]] (Yale Poetry Series) [[Gwendolyn Brooks]] (Pulitzer Prize), [[Rita Dove]] (Pulitzer Prize), and [[Natasha Trethewey]] (Pulitzer Prize).<ref name="ugapress.org"/><ref>{{Cite book|url=https://mississippi.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.14325/mississippi/9781496817839.001.0001/upso-9781496817839/|title = African American Sonnet: A Literary Tradition|year = 2018|doi = 10.14325/mississippi/9781496817839.001.0001|last1 = Müller|first1 = Timo|isbn = 9781496817839|s2cid = 216967131}}</ref> But there were other writers - like [[Langston Hughes]] and [[Amiri Baraka]], for example - who, despite publishing some themselves, questioned the appropriateness of sonnets for Black poets. In the opinion of Hughes, the emergence of truly individual writing based on folk genres and experience was hindered by the imposition of genteel "white" verse forms irrelevant to them.<ref>Jordan D. Finkin, ''Exile as Home: The Cosmopolitan Poetics of Leyb Naydus'', Hebrew Union College Press, 2017, [https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3gV-DwAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false p. 56]</ref>

One aspect of the American sonnet during the 20th century was the publication of sequences which had to wait decades for critical recognition. One instance is ''This Man's Army: A War in Fifty-Odd Sonnets'' (1928) by [[John Allan Wyeth (poet)|John Allan Wyeth]].<ref>[https://books.google.com/books?id=Acdw0ZY1dMAC ''This Man's Army: A War in Fifty-odd Sonnets''], University of South Carolina 2008</ref> A series of irregular sonnets that recorded impressions of his military service with the [[American Expeditionary Force]] during the [[First World War]], it was scarcely noticed when it first appeared. Yet on its republication in 2008, [[Dana Gioia]] asserted in his introduction that Wyeth is the only American poet of the Great War who can stand comparison to British [[war poet]]s,<ref>Dana Gioia, [https://danagioia.com/essays/reviews-and-authors-notes/the-obscurity-of-john-allan-wyeth "The Obscurity of John Allan Wyeth"] (2008)</ref> a claim later corroborated by [[Jon Stallworthy]] in his review of the work.<ref>[[Dana Gioia]], ''John Allan Wyeth: Soldier Poet'', [[St Austin Review]], March/April 2020, p.5.</ref>

Shortly after the publication of Wyeth's, [[H. P. Lovecraft]] wrote his very different sonnet sequence, sections of which first appeared in genre magazines. It was not until 1943 that it saw complete publication as [[Fungi from Yuggoth]]. These 36 poems were written in a hybrid form based on the [[Petrarchan sonnet]] that invariably ends with a rhyming couplet reminiscent of the [[Shakespeare's sonnets#Form and structure of the sonnets|Shakespearean sonnet]].<ref>''An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia'', Greenwood Publishing Group 2001, [https://books.google.com/books?id=Myawoc_PbF4C&dq=petrarchan+%22fungi+from+yuggoth%22&pg=PA95 p.93]</ref> Most of these poems are discontinuous, though unified by theme, being vignettes descriptive of the kinds of dreamed and otherworldly scenarios found in Lovecraft's fiction.<ref>Jim Moon, "The internal continuity of Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth", in ''H.P. Lovecraft: Selected Works, Critical Perspectives and Interviews'',  McFarland, 2018, [https://books.google.com/books?id=syJgDwAAQBAJ&q=rhyme&pg=PT253 p.245]</ref> Their unmannered style was once compared to [[Edward Arlington Robinson]]'s,<ref>S. T. Joshi's introduction to ''An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H.P. Lovecraft'', Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1991 , [https://books.google.com/books?id=S3oH_VdH3BcC&dq=rhyme+%22fungi+from+yuggoth%22&pg=PA36 p.37]</ref> but since then a case has been made for the work as minor poetry of contemporary importance in its own right.<ref>Geoffrey Reiter, "'Alone Before Eternity': A Review of H. P. Lovecraft’s ''Fungi from Yuggoth''", [https://christandpopculture.com/alone-eternity-review-h-p-lovecrafts-fungi-yuggoth ''Christ and Pop Culture'', 27 June 2017]</ref>

[[File:Solt-moonshot 2.jpg|thumb|upright=0.6|[[Mary Ellen Solt]]'s [[concrete poetry|concrete]] "Moonshot sonnet" (1964)]]
In the case of [[John Berryman]], he initially wrote a series of some hundred modernistic love sonnets during the 1940s. These, however, remained uncollected until 1967, when they appeared as ''Berryman’s Sonnets'', fleshed out with a few additions to give them the form of a sequence. In her 2014 survey of the book for ''[[Poetry (magazine)|Poetry]]'', [[April Bernard]] suggests that he was there making of 'Berryman' a similar semi-fictional character to the 'Henry' in [[The Dream Songs]] (1964). She also identifies an ancient ancestry for the disordered syntax of the work through the English poets Thomas Wyatt and Gerard Manley Hopkins.<ref>April Bernard, "Berryman's Sonnets", [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2014/06/berrymans-sonnets Poetry Foundation]</ref>

But at this time too began to appear sequences of [[quatorzain]]s with only a tenuous relationship to the sonnet form. [[Ted Berrigan]]'s ''The Sonnets'' (1964) discard metre and rhyme but retain the dynamics of a 14-line structure with a change of direction at the volta. Berrigan claimed to have been inspired by "Shakespeare’s sonnets because they were quick, musical, witty and short".<ref>Berrigan's talk at the Poetry Project Workshop, [https://www.2009-2019.poetryproject.org/wp-content/uploads/v2-ted-berrigan.pdf 27 February 1979]</ref> Others have described Berrigan's work as a [[Postmodern literature|postmodern]] collage using "repetition, rearrangement, and the use of 'found' phrases and text", that functions as a "radical deconstruction of the sonnet".<ref>Timothy Henry, "Time And Time Again": The Strategy of Simultaneity in Ted Berrigan's ''The Sonnets''", [http://jacketmagazine.com/40/henry-berrigan.shtml ''Jacket'' 40, 2010]</ref> From 1969 [[Robert Lowell]] too began publishing a less radical deconstruction of the form in his series of five collections of [[blank verse]] sonnets, including his [[Pulitzer Prize]] volume ''The Dolphin'' (1973). These he described as having "the eloquence at best of iambic pentameter, and often the structure and climaxes of sonnets".<ref>[https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-lowell "Robert Lowell 1917–1977"], Poetry Foundation</ref>

The contemporary reaction against the strict form is described in the introduction to [[William Baer (writer)|William Baer]]'s anthology ''Sonnets: 150 Contemporary Sonnets'' (2005).  But for all that a number of writers were declaring then that the sonnet was dead, others – including [[Richard Wilbur]], [[Howard Nemerov]] and [[Anthony Hecht]] – continued to write sonnets and eventually became associated with the magazines ''[[The Formalist]]'' and then ''[[Measure (journal)|Measure]]''. These journals, champions of the [[New Formalism]] between the years 1994 and 2017, sponsored the annual [[Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award]].

====Canada====
In Canada during the last decades of the 19th century, the [[Confederation Poets]] and especially [[Archibald Lampman]] were known for their sonnets, which were mainly on pastoral themes.<ref>Malcolm Ross, Introduction, Poets of the Confederation (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1960), vii–xii</ref>

Canadian poet [[Seymour Mayne]] has published a few collections of word sonnets, and is one of the chief innovators of a form using a single word per line to capture its honed perception.<ref>See [http://www.ruor.uottawa.ca/en/handle/10393/20354 Ricochet: ''Word Sonnets / Sonnets d'un mot''] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131029201325/http://www.ruor.uottawa.ca/en/handle/10393/20354 |date=29 October 2013 }}, by Seymour Mayne, French translation: [[:fr:Sabine Huynh|Sabine Huynh]], University of Ottawa Press, 2011.</ref>

===In German===
[[Paulus Melissus]] was the first to introduce the sonnet into [[German poetry]].<ref>{{Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie|21|293|297|Melissus, Paul Schede|Erich Schmidt}}
</ref> But the man who did most to raise the sonnet to German consciousness was [[Martin Opitz]], who in two works, ''Buch von der deutschen Poeterey'' (1624) and ''Acht Bücher Deutscher Poematum'' (1625), established the sonnet as a separate genre and its rules of composition. It was to be written in iambic alexandrines, with alternating masculine and feminine enclosed rhymes in the octave and a more flexible sestet with three rhymes. Reinforcing them were translated examples from Petrarch, Ronsard and [[Daniel Heinsius]].<ref>Michael Haldane, [https://www.michaelhaldane.com/Opitz.htm "Martin Opitz, Father of German Poetry: Translation and the Sonnet"], 2005</ref> Thereafter in the 18th century, [[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]] wrote several love sonnets, using a rhyme scheme derived from Italian poetry. After his death, Goethe's followers created the freer 'German sonnet', which is rhymed ABBA BCCB CDD CDD.

The sonnet tradition was then continued by [[August Wilhelm von Schlegel]], [[Paul von Heyse]] and others, reaching fruition in [[Rainer Maria Rilke]]'s ''[[Sonnets to Orpheus]]'', which has been described as "one of the great modern poems, not to mention a monumental addition to the literature of the sonnet sequence".<ref>David Young's introduction to his translation of ''Sonnets to Orpheus'', Wesleyan University, 1987, [https://books.google.com/books?id=yh90bNsI5wkC p.xv]</ref> A cycle of 55 sonnets, it was written in two parts in 1922 while Rilke was in the midst of completing his [[Duino Elegies]]. The full title in German is ''Die Sonette an Orpheus: Geschrieben als ein Grab-Mal für Wera Ouckama Knoop'' (translated as ''Sonnets to Orpheus: Written as a Monument for Wera Ouckama Knoop''), commemorating the recent death of a young dancer from leukaemia. The ''{{lang|de|Grab-Mal}}'' (literally "grave-marker") of the title brings to mind the series of ''Tombeaux'' written by [[Stéphane Mallarmé]], translated (among others) by Rilke in 1919, also coinciding with the sonnets of Michelangelo which Rilke had been translating in 1921. Rilke's own sonnets are fluidly structured as a transposition of the dead girl's dancing and encompass themes of life and death and art's relation to them. As well as having varied rhyme schemes, line lengths also vary and are irregularly metred, even within the same sonnet at times.<ref>Charlie Louth, "Die Sonnette an Orpheus", in [https://books.google.com/books?id=Gb_1DwAAQBAJ ''Rilke, The Life of the Work''], OUP 2020, pp.455–509</ref>

Responses to turbulent times form a distinct category among German sonnets. They include [[Friedrich Rückert]]'s 72 "Sonnets in Armour" (''Geharnischte Sonneten'', 1814), stirring up [[War of the Sixth Coalition|resistance to Napoleonic domination]]; and sonnets by [[Emanuel Geibel]] written during the [[German revolutions of 1848–1849]] and the [[First Schleswig War]].<ref>”Critical History of the Sonnet", ''Dublin Review'' 79 (1876), [https://books.google.com/books?id=m1YVAQAAIAAJ&dq=Ruckert+%22Geharnischte+Sonette%22&pg=PA418 p. 418]</ref> In the wake of the [[First World War]], [[Anton Schnack]], described by one anthologist as "the only German language poet whose work can be compared with that of [[Wilfred Owen]]", published the sonnet sequence, ''Tier rang gewaltig mit Tier'' ("Beast Strove Mightily with Beast", 1920). The 60 poems there have the typical German sonnet form, but are written in the long-lined free rhythms developed by [[Ernst Stadler]].<ref name="Patrick Bridgwater 1985 page 97">Patrick Bridgwater (1985), ''The German Poets of the First World War'', page 97.</ref> Patrick Bridgwater, writing in 1985, called the work "without question the best single collection produced by a German [[war poet]] in 1914–18," but adds that it "is to this day virtually unknown even in Germany."<ref>Bridgwater (1985), ''The German Poets of the First World War'', p. 96.</ref>

===In Dutch ===
In the Netherlands [[Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft]] introduced sonnets in the Baroque style, of which ''Mijn lief, mijn lief, mijn lief: soo sprack mijn lief mij toe'' presents a notable example of sound and word play.<ref>Harold B. Segel, ''The Baroque Poem'', New York, 1974, pp.268–9</ref> Another of his
sonnets, dedicated to [[Hugo Grotius]], was later translated by [[Edmund Gosse]].<ref>{{cite web| url = http://www.bartleby.com/342/222.html| title = Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft (1581–1647), "To Hugo Grotius"| date = 4 October 2022}}</ref> In later centuries the sonnet form was dropped and then returned to by successive waves of innovators in an attempt to breathe new life into Dutch poetry when, in their eyes, it had lost its way. For the generation of the 1880s it was [[Jacques Perk]]'s sonnet sequence ''Mathilde'' which served as a rallying cry. And for a while in the early years of the new century, [[Martinus Nijhoff]] wrote notable sonnets before turning to more modernistic models.<ref>Reinder P. Meijer, ''Literature of the Low Countries'', Martinus Nijhoff, 1978; pp.237–8, 304–5</ref>

Following the [[Second World War]], avant-garde poets declared war on all formalism, reacting particularly against the extreme subjectivity and self-aggrandisement of representatives of the 1880s style like [[Willem Kloos]], who had once begun a sonnet "In my deepest being I'm a god". In reaction, [[Lucebert]] satirised such writing in the "sonnet" with which his first collection opened: <poem>::I/ me/ I/ me// me/ I/ me/  I// I/ I/ my// my/ my/ I<ref>Marc Kregting, [https://www.tijdschriftskut.nl/category/tekstsoort/essay "Mijn oorlog of de jouwe: over 'sonnet' van Lucebert"], ''Skut'', July 2019</ref></poem> But by the end of the 20th century, formalist poets such as [[Gerrit Komrij]] and [[Jan Kal]] were writing sonnets again as part of their own reaction to the experimentalism of earlier decades.<ref>''Turning Tides'' (ed. Peter van de Kamp), Story Line Press, 1994, p.389</ref>