ABSTRACT

The sonnet is a short lyric form which, since its invention in Italy in the thirteenth century, has provided European poets with the most exacting test of their formal prowess. Though the canzone’s interwoven rhymes seem more complicated, and the sestina’s six recurrent endwords or the haiku’s seventeen syllables more restricting, in the sonnet mere stringency of means operates upon a complex dynamic structure to create unexpectedly large poetic resources. It is this interaction to which the form owes its perennial attraction.