The sonnet is a quintessential form of Italian poetry. It was invented at the court of Frederick II in the early thirteenth century and forms an essential part of the birth of the vernacular poetic tradition. Its impact was immediate and long-lasting, and it is a form that continues to be used and adapted to this day. A traditional history of the development of the sonnet into a popular poetic form tends to begin with Petrarch’s extensive use of it in his collection of vernacular poetry Rerum vulgarium fragmenta [Fragments of Vernacular Things], followed by Shakespeare’s adaptation of it, and then on to various European and extra-European poets—from Joachim du Bellay to Pushkin to Rabindranath Tagore—who have experimented with the form through the centuries. While speaking to the tremendous international success of the sonnet, this path takes something away both from the origins of the sonnet as well as its continuous use in Italian poetry through the centuries and up to the present.
Though some of the details remain a mystery, it is clear that the sonnet was invented at the court of Frederick II in Sicily in the early part of the thirteenth century. The principal poet of the Scuola Siciliana, the Sicilian school of poetry that initiated the Italian lyric tradition, was Giacomo da Lentini, and he may be considered the inventor of the form. It is Giacomo’s poetry that is best conserved in the lyric anthologies of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century that are primarily responsible for preserving the early Italian poetic tradition. Giacomo’s twenty-one sonnets (with two others being of more dubious attribution) are by far the most numerous of the early poets of the Sicilian school and he is acknowledged by fellow poets as the authority in matters of poetry and love. Giacomo’s poetry is marked not only by translating the courtly love tradition established by other vernacular poetry like the Occitan, but also by an active distilling of science and philosophy in the new vernacular.
Various theories abound with respect to the inspiration for the form of the sonnet. The prior Occitan tradition had poets exchanging individual coblas (stanzas) of their poems in a form called the tenso, which may have served as a basis for the Sicilian attention to the individual short form and certainly served as a model for the exchange of sonnets that would become known as the tenzone. It has also been suggested that the numbers of the form—fourteen lines of eleven syllables each—are significant in their relation to the commonly accepted value of pi at the time 22/7, thus making the sonnet into a geometric meter that reflects the intellectual engagement of the Federician court and its poets, who were all court functionaries. The possibility of this mathematical foundation corresponds very well to the notable philosophical content of early sonnets, such as Giacomo da Lentini’s Amor è uno desio che ven da core [Love is a Desire that Comes from the Heart], which he wrote as the final response in atenzone exchange on the nature of love with fellow poets Iacopo Mostacci and Pier della Vigna:
Amor è uno disio che ven da core
per abondanza di gran piacimento,
e li occhi imprima generan l’amore
e lo core li dà nutricamento.
Ben è alcuna fiata om amatore
senza vedere so ‘namoramento,
ma quell’amore che stringe con furore
da la vista de li occhi à nascimento,
che li occhi rappresentan a lo core
d’onni cosa che veden bono e rio,
com’è formata naturalemente;
e lo cor, che di zo è concepitore,
imagina, e piace quel disio;
e questo amore regna fra la gente.
[Love is a desire that comes from the heart / through an abundance of great pleasure: / the eyes first generate love, / and the heart gives it sustenance. / There are some times that a man is a lover / without seeing the object of his love, / but that love which grips with fury / has its beginning from the sight of the eyes, / because the eyes represent to the heart / the sight of everything that they see, good and bad, / as it is naturally formed; / and the heart, which is the conceiver of it, / makes an image and pleases that desire; / and this love reigns among the people.]
Giacomo’s physiological explanation of love as desire that moves through the body captures the intellectual investment of the early sonnet tradition. It also demonstrates the value of the short sonnet form in creating communities of poetic and intellectual exchange. This is not to say, however, that the sonnet was merely used to treat such refined matters or that it was exclusively consigned to the realm of love poetry. A later tenzone between Dante Alighieri and Forese Donati, most likely written sometime in the period 1283-1296, has both poets leveling insults at one another that range from sexual inadequacy to questionable financial practices and accusations of drunkenness. This attention to social detail forms a telling strain of the early sonnet tradition that emerges often in these correspondences, but it is not confined to the tenzone alone. Individual poets like the Compiuta Donzella, active in late thirteenth century Florence, bring such social detail into their individual sonnets as well.
Though a minor voice, with three sonnets preserved in the largest anthology of early Italian poetry, Vaticano Latino 3793, the Compiuta Donzella represents a key precedent of a woman who writes poetry instead of being confined to the role of a poetic object of desire. It is possible that these poems are written by a male poet masquerading as a woman, in line with the tradition of the tenzone fittizia, an exchange where either one poet or multiple poets takes on the role of male and female respectively. Nonetheless, the social detail that emerges in this poetry, whether authentic or the product of role-playing, is worth noting:
A la stagion che ’l mondo foglia e fiora
acresce gioia a tutti fin’ amanti:
vanno insieme a li giardini alora
che gli auscelletti fanno dolzi canti;
la franca gente tutta s’inamora,
e di servir ciascun tragges’ inanti,
ed ogni damigella in gioia dimora;
e me, n’abondan marrimenti e pianti.
Ca lo mio padre m’ha messa ’n errore,
E tenemi sovente in forte doglia:
donar mi vole a mia forza segnore,
ed io di ciò non ho disio né voglia,
e ’n gran tormento vivo a tutte l’ore;
però non mi ralegra fior né foglia.
[In the season that the world flowers and brings forth new leaves / joy grows for all true lovers: / they go together to gardens in the hour / when birds sing their sweet songs; / all noble people fall in love, / and each of them move to serve their love, / and every damsel passes her time in joy; / and they abandon me to pain and weeping. / For my father has put me in error / and keeps me often in great pain: / he wants to give me to a lord against my will, / and I have neither will nor desire for it, / and every hour I pass in great torment; / so that neither flower nor leaf make me happy.]
The Compiuta Donzella’s poetry is striking in its lament against the social convention of a father making a marriage for his daughter; it adds a dose of reality to the idyllic world of love poetry where lovers join one another in gardens and the birds sing for joy. Formally, this sonnet perfectly captures the feature of the volta, or turn, between the octave (the first eight verses, sometimes seen as two quatrains) and the sextet (the last six verses, or two tercets): the shift is abrupt and pronounced between the idealized spring of love and the winter of the poet’s despair that she will be given in marriage against her will.
We can see the Compiuta Donzella resonating with later female poets of the sixteenth century like Gaspara Stampa and Vittoria Colonna, both accomplished lyric poets who wrote a good number of sonnets in the style of Petrarch. The advent of Petrarchism in the sixteenth century is very much oriented toward imitating the dominant form of Petarch’s vernacular poetry, the sonnet, and so might take us back to a brief consideration of the thirteenth-century history of collecting and organizing sonnets as well as some attention to the dominant figure in the history of this poetic form, Francesco Petrarca.
While the poetic exchanges of sonnets, the tenzoni, formed natural collections of sonnets around a particular theme and group of poets, there were also early gestures toward grouping sonnets in the later part of the thirteenth century, such as Guittone d’Arezzo’s corona of sonnets, known as the Trattato d’Amore [Treatise of Love]. In this series of twelve sonnets, Guittone aimed to systematically dismantle the cult of love by revealing its true and terrible nature through a reinterpretation of well-known tropes such as love’s wings or blindness. Dante Alighieri’s Vita nuova [New Life] collects a good number of the poet’s youthful love sonnets (as well as other meters like the canzone and ballata) that are analyzed and interpreted in a narrative prose frame to create his love story with Beatrice. Dante also follows Guittone in experimenting with variations of the form of the sonnet, such as the sonetto rinterzato and the sonetto doppio, where seven-syllable lines are interspersed throughout the poem to “stuff” it even more fully.
Dante’s Vita nuova is, in a sense, dominated by sonnets, with 27 of the 31 lyrics (including the one variant of the double sonnet) being of the form. It sets the stage for Francesco Petrarca’s grand project of a collection of his vernacular poetry, the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta [Fragments of Vernacular Things]. A vast array of lyric components whose ordering took the poet until his death in 1374, it is dominated by 317 sonnets out of the total 366 poems. Petrarch’s work is rightly considered a landmark in the history of the sonnet, and its popularity provoked imitation and homage throughout the ensuing centuries, as we have mentioned in part with the petrarchisti of the sixteenth century.
Even in the immediate aftermath of Petrarch, the sonnet quickly became a form that was employed by poets and luminaries alike. Whether it be Lorenzo de’ Medici writing and commenting upon his sonnets, modeling himself after both Dante and Petrarch, or one of his preferred artists, Michelangelo Buonarroti, writing numerous sonnets and engaging in a prolonged exchange with Vittoria Colonna, the meter certainly was not lacking in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. That Michelangelo, very well-known as a sculptor and painter, was also a prolific poet and sonneteer demonstrates the influence of the sonnet beyond an exclusively literary realm. In that vein, we might also consider the verse of Galileo Galilei as pointing to the way in which the vernacular form of the sonnet continued to cross borders between artistic and scientific disciplines, as it had done from the very beginning of the Italian poetic tradition.
In his seventeenth-century sonnet L’enimma o sonetto enigmatico [The Enigma, or The Enigmatic Sonnet], Galileo playfully uses the form of the sonnet in a way that conflates objects of amorous and scientific desire:
Monstro son’io più strano e più diforme
Che l’Apria, la Sirena o la Chimera;
Nè in terra, in aria, in acqua è alcuna fiera,
Ch’abbia di membra così varie forme;
Parte a parte non ho che sia conforme,
Più che s’una sia bianca e l’altra nera;
Spesso di cacciator dietro ho una schiera,
Che de’ miei piè van rintracciando l’orme.
Nelle tenebre oscure è il mio soggiorno,
Che se dall’ombre al chiaro lume passo,
Tosto l’alma da me sen fugge, come
Sen fugge il sogno all’apparir del giorno,
E le mie membra disunite lasso,
E l’esser perdo con la vita, e il nome.
[I a stranger and more deformed monster / than the Harpy, the Siren, or the Chimera; / there is no beast on earth, air, or sea / that has members of such varied form; / I have no part that conforms with any other, / even more than if one were white and the other black; / I often have a train of hunters behind me, / who go on tracing my footsteps. / I stay in the dark shadows, / for if I pass from the shadows to the light, / my soul would flee from me as quickly as / a dream flees at the appearance of day, / both my scattered members / and I lose my being, along with my life and my name.]
Galileo’s sonnet lives up to its name in its playful and enigmatic quality, but is also notable for its attention to observation and the play between light and dark that are essential parts of astronomical inquiry. Customarily taken as an homage to the telescope, it may also be that he alludes to a comet, which he famously held in his work Il Saggiatore [The Assayer] to be an optical illusion and thus something that would be tracked and then disappear in the light of day. In either case, this use of the sonnet further attests to the link between science and poetry that remains centuries after the inception of the meter.
Manifestly the most traditional form of Italian poetry, the sonnet may be taken by poets as either a way to inscribe themselves into the tradition, or something to avoid in order to stand apart. It is perhaps a way to connect back to tradition for the poet Ugo Foscolo, who published his collection Poesie [Poems] around the turn of the nineteenth century. Twelve of the fourteen poems in the collection are sonnets that touch on matters romantic, classical, and patriotic. Giacomo Leopardi, likely the most famous nineteenth-century Italian poet, seems to have a particular aversion to the form. There are no sonnets to be found in his seminal collection Canti [Songs], and his best known poem, L’infinito, composed of fifteen hendecasyllable lines of blank verse, seems to be a defiant turn against the codified form of the sonnet with its refusal to rhyme and its extra line. But Leopardi, too, experimented with the form in an earlier phase of his career; he published five sonnets in 1817 (technically sonetti caudati, sonnets with tails of a seven-syllable line, followed by a couplet of eleven-syllable lines) under the title Sonetti in persona di Ser Pecora Fiorentino Beccaio [Sonnets in the Person of Ser Pecora the Florentine Butcher]. In this series of poems, Leopardi rises to the defense of friends whose work has been attacked in the newspaper by assuming the persona of a medieval comic poet and takes up the sonnet as the ideal form with which to do so.
The sonnet does not lack for twentieth-century adaptation or influence. A notable sonnet collection is Umberto Saba’s 1923 Autobiografia [Autobiography], where the poet recounts his life in a series of fifteen sonnets of remarkable frankness and simplicity. Andrea Zanzotto stringently follows the form of the sonnet in the second part of his 1978 collection Galateo in bosco [Etiquette in the Woods], which is comprised of sixteen sonnets and entitled Ipersonetto [Hypersonnet]. Zanzotto does not depart from the meter in the slightest way, but the content of his sonnets is distinctly modern and plays upon the paradox of civilization in the wild, untamed forest of his native Veneto. Perhaps the best modern tribute to the continued vitality of the form of the sonnet is in one of the last poems that Edoardo Sanguineti wrote before his death in 2010, the “astral” sonnet pulsano pulsar con forti pulsioni [Pulsars Pulse with Strong Forces] that once more brings the language of science into the form of vernacular poetry:
pulsano pulsar con forti pulsioni:
ecco a voi quasar, quasi stelle vive:
collassano assai dense, per pressioni
che imbucano per sempre, in nere rive:
così forse è: facelle in evezioni,
sciami di nebulose fuggitive,
supergiganti, code in librazioni,
variabili cefeidi recidive:
protuberanze, e getti, e radiazioni
corpuscolari, eclissi comprensive
di pieni pianetini e pianetoni,
aurori ipercompresse in somme stive:
oh, chiare notti gravitazionali
mie fragile scintille zodiacali!
[pulsars pulse with strong forces: / here to you quasars, almost living stars: / so dense that they collapse, because of the pressures / that hide them forever, in black shores: / so it is perhaps: little lights in evections, / swarms of nebulous fugitives, / supergiants, tails in libration, / variable relapsing cepheids: / protuberances, and spurts and corpuscular / radiations, total eclipses / of minor planets and major ones, / auroras hypercompressed in the highest holds: / oh, clear gravitational nights / my fragile zodiac sparks!]
From Giacomo da Lentini to Edoardo Sanguineti, from the thirteenth century to the twenty-first, the form of the sonnet continues to be a vital part of the Italian poetic tradition and one that pushes poetry to ever greater engagement with the highest reaches of intellectual culture. Used across the ages by poets and rulers, artists and scientists, it has tackled issues both scientific and social and remains a force to be reckoned with even as new forms of poetry never cease to emerge.
Works Cited
Edoardo Sanguineti. pulsano pulsar con forti pulsioni. In
Edoardo Sanguineti. Varie ed eventuali: Poesie 1995-2010.
Milan: Feltrinelli, 2010.
Galileo Galilei. L’enimma. In Galileo Galilei. Rime.
Antonio Marzo, ed. Rome: Salerno, 2001.
Giacomo da Lentini. Amor è un disio che ven da core. In I
poeti della scuola siciliana, vol. 1. Roberto Antonelli, et
al., eds. Milan: Mondadori, 2008.
La Compiuta Donzella. A la stagion che ’l mondo foglia e
fiore. In Poeti del Duecento, vol. 1. Gianfranco
Contini, ed. Milan: Ricciardi, 1960.
All translations into English are my own.
2930 words
Citation: Kumar, Akash. "Italian sonnet tradition". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 16 September 2014 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=19371, accessed 15 January 2025.]
