HOW THE SONNET TURNS

This essay is adapted from a lecture delivered at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, on January 10, 2010, at the winter residency. My thanks to The American Poetry Review for their graceful and gracious assistance in the adaptation.

In Phillis Levin’s introduction to The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, she writes that “fourteen lines do not guarantee a sonnet: it is the behavior of those lines in relation to each other—their choreography—that identifies the form” (xxxvii–xxxviii). Later she explains, “We could say that for the sonnet, the volta is the seat of its soul” (xxxix). The volta, or the turn, is crucial to the identity of the sonnet. For many theorists, the volta itself marks not merely the emergence of a new form, but the formal embodiment1 of Early Modern subjectivity. As Paul Oppenheimer puts it, quite bluntly, “Modern thought and literature began with the invention of the sonnet” (3). Oppenheimer stresses that the sonnet is the first poetic form meant to be read silently—and that silent reading was still something of a novelty. Medieval poetry focused heavily on allegory, externalizing conflicts with the goal of finding spiritual unity with a distant God (9). The sonnet placed conflict at the personal level, treating the divided self as a divided self (24). Oppenheimer celebrates the sonnet for introducing a structure that was at once mathematical, logical, and personal. “If an emotional problem were to be resolved in a mere fourteen lines, and in isolation, it would have to be resolved in a particular way: by the poet and the poet themselves, and within the mind of the poet. There was no one else, no outside, no audience. It was in perceiving this, and then creating a poetry to match, that Giacomo [inventor of the sonnet] arrived at a stroke of genius that was to lead to major changes in how most poets and other writers were to write ever since” (24). In other words, the volta indexes an interiority that is indicative of how we understand ourselves and our art. The turn is necessarily a turn inwards, a divided self that need not distribute its warring factions across a series of allegorical selves, but rather presents a self that is defined by its own contradictions.

Levin begins her masterful sonnet anthology with a Proem, a Chaucer translation of Petrarch’s 132 into his own “Canticus Troili” or The Song of Troilus from his “Troilus and Criseyde.” The poem begins “If no love is, O God, what fele I so?” (1) and ends “For hete of cold, for cold of heat, I dye” (21). This is crucial, because it marks the paradox of the divided self—that one might freeze burn, that one might deny love’s existence while also suffering from love’s existence. In rather broad terms, taking over from the unitary self of medieval Christendom. I often explain this shift in “subjectivity” to my students by comparing , the medieval miracle play from the 1400s, to . The title character of wants simply to have fun and not to die. But when the character Death comes for Everyman, Everyman goes to the afterlife, as he must, only with the character Good-Deeds in tow, leaving behind Fellowship, Goods, and Beauty—characters in the play. Internal desires blend with externalized objects of desire, cast as characters in a play and distributed among actors. The title character of , on the other hand, is a bit of mystery to himself, and spends a great deal of time figuring out what he thinks, and often inquires into how, as one person, he might decide among the options that are offered by the various facets of his own divided self. Hamlet’s divisions are internal—and while Hamlet’s ghost can be read as a holdover from that medieval impulse to externalize aspects of the self—Hamlet is one person with many desires, but a single life to act in (or not act in). Ironically, it’s actually easier to read the witches in as an aspect of Macbeth’s self, but those folks really did believe in witches, and King James wrote a whole book on how to spot witches. Chaucer’s Troilus encounters love as a proto-form of division—as a paradox; he doesn’t have quite the labyrinthine psyche of Hamlet, but that’s about 200 years or so in the future, waiting to arrive in English and England alongside the European sonnet. 2 The sonnet in English first found purchase in translations like Chaucer’s, then through translations by Sir Thomas Wyatt that retained the fourteen-lined sonnet form we know as the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, and then Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, innovated the form by moving the volta to between the twelfth line and the final couplet, originating what we now know as the Shakespearian or English Sonnet (Levin lii–liii). Still, the way we use “sonnet” is a slightly later addition—originally in English, “sonnets,” from the Italian “sonneti” or little sound (Oppenheimer 173),