A sonnet is a fixed poetic form with a structure traditionally consisting of fourteen lines adhering to a set rhyming scheme. The term derives from the Italian word sonetto (lit. 'little song', from the Latin word sonus, lit. 'sound'). Originating in 13th-century Sicily, the sonnet was in time taken up in many European-language areas, mainly to express romantic love at first, although eventually any subject was considered acceptable. Many formal variations were also introduced, including abandonment of the quatorzain limit – and even of rhyme altogether in modern times.
Romance languages
Sicilian Giacomo da Lentini is credited with the sonnet's invention at the Court of Frederick II in the Sicilian city of Palermo. The Sicilian School of poets who surrounded Lentini then spread the form to the mainland. Those earliest sonnets no longer survive in the original Sicilian language, however, but only after being translated into Tuscan dialect. The form consisted of a pair of quatrains followed by a pair of tercets with the symmetrical rhyme scheme A B A B A B A B C D C D C D {\displaystyle \mathrm {ABABABAB\,\,CDCDCD} } , where the sense is carried forward in a new direction after the midway break. Peter Dronke has commented that there was something intrinsic to its flexible form that contributed to the sonnet's survival far beyond its region of origin. William Baer suggests that the first eight lines of the earliest Sicilian sonnets are identical to the eight-line Sicilian folksong stanza known as the Strambotto. To this, da Lentini (or whoever else invented the form) added two tercets to the Strambotto in order to create the new 14-line sonnet form. In contrast, Hassanally Ladha argued that the Sicilian sonnet's structure and content drew upon Arabic poetry and cannot be explained as the "invention" of the Sicilian School of poets. Ladha notes that "in its Sicilian beginnings, the sonnet evinces literary and epistemological contact with the qasida", and emphasizes that the sonnet did not emerge simultaneously with its supposedly defining 14-line structure. "Tellingly, attempts to close off the sonnet from its Arabic predecessors depend upon a definition of the new lyric to which Giacomo's poetry does not conform: surviving in thirteenth-century recensions, his poems appear not in fourteen, but rather six lines, including four rows, each with two hemistiches and two 'tercets' each in a line extending over two rows." In Ladha's view, the sonnet emerges as the continuation of a broader tradition of love poetry throughout the Mediterranean world and relates to such other forms as the Sicilian strambotto, the Provençal canso, the Andalusi Arabic muwashshah and zajal, as well as the qasida.
Italian
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