Michael Delahoyde
Washington State University
Poetry is generally still an adjunct profession in
the Renaissance, not a primary occupation. The Renaissance poet
still operates largely under the medieval notion that art is a
craft.
Petrarch (1304-1374) is considered "the first writer of the
Renaissance." Although his Italian sonnets rely on courtly love
conventions, the Renaissance sees a sort of codification of the
material and certainly of the form.
Petrarchan love conventions:
she often has a classical name like Stella or Delia.
the poet-lover praises his mistress, the object and image of
Love, with praise for her superlative qualities using descriptions
of beauty supplied by Petrarch: "golden hair," "ruby lips," "ivory
breast."
the poet employs contradictory and oxymoronic phrases and
images: freezing and burning, binding freedom (see Petrarch's
#134).
the poet-lover dwells only on the subjective experience,
hence on the misery of being in love: thus the occasional appearance
of the conventional invocation to sleep to allay the pain (insomnia
poems).
the poet disclaims credit for poetic merits: the
inspiration of his mistress is what makes the poetry good, he
claims.
the poet promises to protect the youth of his lady and his own
love against time (through the immortalizing poetry itself).
Petrarch's own sonnets are characterized by the phrase (or motto)
"emotion recollected in tranquility." These poems capture and
crystalize an emotional state of being, but often a melancholy one.
The poet seems continuously at work recording all the subtle
modulations of feeling. It is said that the self-centered
quality of this kind of work is new. But the focus on the subjective
state and of the suffering self as opposed to the lady supposedly
at the heart of the matter is all part of courtly love poetry
and to be found repeatedly in medieval poetry and lyrics. Perhaps
the degree of precision in the anatomy of the love process can
be claimed as new to the Renaissance. And characteristically
Renaissance is the celebration of that attraction to mortal beauty
and earthly values as sublime.
Two hundred years later, England began tentatively to move towards
its own Renaissance at last in the poetry of Wyatt and Surrey, inspired
by and often just loose translations of Petrarch. Sir Thomas Wyatt
(1503-1542), a diplomat in the court of Henry VIII, and Henry Howard,
Earl of Surrey (1517-1547), the last person beheaded under Henry VII,
introduced the Petrarchan sonnet to England in the early- and mid-1500s
and sometimes displaying a more original English temperament. Surrey,
an uncle of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, established the English
sonnet form (iambic pentameter lines rhyming ababcdcdefefgg), also
known as the Shakespearean sonnet form. Since we don't have as easy a
time rhyming as do romance languages, the English language simply cannot
sustain the Italian rhyme scheme of abba abba etc. without
devolving into doggerel. (Surrey also, in translations of excerpts
from Virgil's Aeneid, the blank verse that eventually would
characterize English verse.)
As Petrarchan conventions became established, a simultaneous inclination
to sound original emerged. Later English sonnet developments included:
an emphasis in mode upon persuasive reasoning.
the inclusion of physical love with the platonic.
an increased self-consciousness about the act of composing itself (love
poetry about love poetry).
For the Elizabethans, "sonnet" referred to any short poem. What we call
sonnets (the rhetorically ornate 14 lines of iambic pentameter with the
elaborate rhyme scheme) they called "quatorzains."
Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) traced an unrequited love relationship
through its stages in the sonnet cycle Astrophel and Stella.
Although written in 1582 and circulating privately, it was not published
until 1591 at which point it helped inaugurate the sonnet vogue with its
standard themes: insistence on originality and disclaimers of
conventionality, the lady's coldness, the poet's despair, the lady's
beauties, invocations to sleep, the immortality of the verse. Sidney
often addresses the issue of composition -- how not to be self-conscious
and phony -- so we get from him lots of love poetry about love poetry.
He has a gift for zinger last lines, but it's also possible to see why
the Earl of Oxford called him a "puppy."
Edmund Spenser later in the century offered some technical innovations
in the form. His sonnet cycle, Amoretti ("Little Love-Poems")
seems to be devoted to his courtship of the woman who became his second
wife in 1594. The Spenserian archaism (fake "olde tyme" spelling) is a
rather annoying technique for coping with self-consciousness.
Roughly 1200 sonnets survive in print from the Elizabethan 1590s.
Among the deservedly big names in sonnet cycles are Thomas Watson
(a pseudonym? check out the acrostic in Shakespeare's #76) --
Hekatompathia -- Samuel Daniel -- Delia -- and Michael
Drayton -- Idea. The fad declined rapidly and sonnets were no
longer the hip thing after the 1590s.
Shake-speares Sonnets is a completely different phenomenon.
the poet (male) addresses a lady (corresponding to Petrarch's
Laura).
a replacement of the Petrarchan metaphor (expressing the unity of all
things) with a simile drawn from common observation and direct perception.
Otis, William Bradley, and Morriss H. Needleman. An Outline History of English Literature: Volume I. NY: Barnes and Noble, 1967.
Wells, Stanley. Shakespeare: A Life in Drama. NY: W.W. Norton and Co., 1995.