Sonnet Project Foreword/Intro
Foreword
The sonnet as a form was born in early 13th century Sicily at the intersection of the scientific advances of the North Africa Moors and the troubadour poetry traditions of southern France. It began as a poetry of love and romance, of higher love, of distant love. Scholars attribute the codification of the sonnet form to the Sicilian notary, Giacomo da Lentini.
The Sicilian poets gave the sonnet its present form: fourteen lines with a separation between the first eight lines, the octet, and the remaining six, the sestet. Connected in form to the songs of the troubadours, the sonnet was more akin to an argument, a proof, a conversation, perhaps, and at times a prayer, than just a song. Giacomo’s sestet, it was speculated, derived from the zajal, a popular oral tradition among the Arabs living in Sicily during the time.
Other names come up in the history of the sonnet. Dante, Italy’s greatest poet, made ample use of the sonnet, both in Vita Nuovo and in The Divine Comedy to portray the interior life of the suffering lover and his passion for his beloved. Later, Petrarch emerged as the greatest and most influential writer of sonnets in history. Petrarch developed a definite rhyming scheme for what came to be known as the Petrarchan sonnet. Where Dante used the sonnet to describe a prayer or divine aspirations, Petrarch focused on the earthly, erotic life torments and pleasures. Dante had his Beatrice. Petrarch had his Laura.
Petrarch’s work found imitation in the work of a British diplomat, Sir Thomas Wyatt, who, in the mid-16th century, was the first to write in the sonnet form in the English language. About the same time, Clement Marot, Joachim du Bellay, and Pierre de Ronsard wrote sonnets in French, Juan Boscan and Garcilaso de la Vega introduced the sonnet form in Spanish and Luis de Camoes carried the sonnet form into Portuguese.
Most of the sonnets during this “explosion” of the form (mid 1500’s to mid 1600’s) were not love or romantic poems. Most were tributes, elegies, dedications, and records of exploits, journeys and discoveries. Meanwhile, the first stirrings of nationalism and the eventual emergence of the nation state in Europe during the same period and the corresponding requirement for communications across cultures and national boundaries may well have given rise to the development of literary forms which then became entwined with the evolution of structured formats for diplomatic conversations and formal communications. It is hardly a stretch when one considers that so many diplomats have been poets and writers of sonnets.
It was the same Wyatt, the British diplomat mentioned earlier, who, while in service to Henry VIII, first developed the sonnet’s couplet ending, all the while maintaining the Petrarchan format.
Late 16th century England produced a second “explosion” of sonnet writers. While there were scores of sonnet writers creating hundreds if not thousands of sonnets during the Elizabethan period, one emerged supreme: William Shakespeare. Arguably, Shakespeare did more with the sonnet form than anybody before him, and perhaps anybody since.
In the early seventeenth century John Donne linked a series of sonnets by their first and last lines, an innovation he named the Corona. Most of Donne’s sonnets covered religious themes. The mid-seventeenth century saw the emergence of John Milton, a prolific sonnet writer best known for his epic blank verse poem, Paradise Lost.
The Elizabethan period in England gave way to the Victorian period of the mid 1800’s and the romantics, with production of sonnets by Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and others. During the same period, sonnet writing across the Atlantic took root.
The earliest recorded sonnet written in the newly emerging country, the Unites States, was written by a former military soldier, Colonel David Humphreys. Humphreys entered the army at the beginning of the American Revolution and by 1780 had become a colonel and aide-de-camp to General Washington. Following his war service he helped negotiate trade treaties with Franklin, Adams and Jefferson and served as minister to Lisbon and minister to Madrid in the early days of the Republic.
Predating Humphrey’s first sonnet by four years are the early sonnet-like attempts by the young enslaved woman, Phillis Wheatley. Trafficked by slave traders to Boston as a nine year old, she quickly mastered English, and began a study of Latin and Greek under the tutelage of her benevolent owners. Wheatley would go on to be the first African American producer of a book of poems in 1773.
Following Wheatley and Humphreys, scores of Americans embraced the sonnet form, including, to name mere few, the abolitionist, William Cullen Bryant, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, best known for her Sonnets from the Portuguese, slavery apologist William Gilmore Simms, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Edgar Allan Poe, and the diplomat James Russell Lowell, who served variously as Minister to Spain and to England.
During the Civil War, there was a resurgence of sonnet writing among the Afro-Creoles of Louisiana, much of which, because of digitization of local newspapers, is just recently being translated from French to English. The end of Reconstruction found former slaves and descendants of free blacks and former slaves picking up sonnet’s pen, most notably Albery Allison Whitman, Henrietta Cordelia Ray and Paul Laurence Dunbar, passing Wheatley’s torch to the first generation of African American poets in the 20th century, the precursors to the New Negro Renaissance, aka, the Harlem Renaissance.
Yet another rebirth of the sonnet form occurred among the poets of the Harlem Renaissance. It would be easy but myopic to conclude that the so-called protest sonnets written by a handful of poets, namely Claude McKay and Countee Cullen, constituted the primary effort at sonnets by African American writers. Essays and books exist limiting the sonnet writers of a certain ethnicity during this period to a single function, protest and victimhood, all other attempts (dedications, elegies, romantic and distant love, lost love, for example) being merely aberrations. But denying that African American writers exercised the full range of emotional expression in their sonnet production would be a fairly serious error if not an unfortunate miscalculation. We hope to demonstrate with this collection of sonnets that these writers participated in the full range of sonnet applications.
The story of the sonnet doesn’t end here, nor with this group of writers.
Acknowledgement
Everything I do in poetry is a direct result of my father’s love for poetry and my grandfather’s love of song. I was fortunate to have really great English teachers in high school and even the occasional mathematics teacher who loved poetry, reciting it, analyzing it.
In college I met a woman who had a bit of a sonnet obsession. She reintroduced me to the form. We wrote sonnets that we exchanged back and forth by email, by recorded telephone messages, and later by letters when I was deployed with the Navy. A relationship never materialized. How poetic!
Then, just before I retired, I took an online course, a MOOC, Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, ModPo, that reignited the flame. The MOOC course became an annual occurrence.
I found these sonnets in a variety of places. Old anthologies preserved online and anthologies in my personal library gave me a start. DC Public Library provided single poet volumes that I poured through looking for fourteen-liners. And books I identified and couldn’t find at the public library I was able to find at local bookshops and online bookstores (we ran out of space in our bookshelves long, long ago. Fortunately there is a little library just across the street that eagerly accepts deposits!). Online poetry sites were a useful source once I established a list of names.
Books on the sonnet itself proved very helpful in identifying writers and movements in the history of the form. And old issues of Opportunity: journal of Negro life (1923 - 1949) and Crisis (especially during Jessie Faucet’s tenure as Literary editor, 1918-1926) accessible online. Burt and Mimics (The Art of the Sonnet), Bender and Squire (The Sonnet: An Anthology), Hirsch and Boland (The Making of a Sonnet), and Levin (The Penguin Book of the Sonnet), to name a few, were books I had purchased over the years and never fully read, I confess.
Introduction
When I began this project, my goal was to pull together a collection of sonnets by African American writers to keep on my bed table for night reading. I initially thought about collecting 100 pieces, then the number expanded to one per night for a year. After exhausting all the books and anthologies in my private library. I started making trips to our neighborhood public library. Then I discovered gaps and those gaps led me to the Library of Congress just a few Metro stops away. I am a docent there and already had a reader’s card but it was out of date, yet another COVID casualty.
Before I knew it, the number of sonnets had swollen to nearly 700. That’s when I decided I didn’t need to include every sonnet by Henrietta Ray, or Paul Laurence Dunbar, or Claude McKay, or Countee Cullen, or even Marilyn Nelson, though I loved them all. So I began a weeding exercise to place un-uniform limits per poet. Also, along the way I discovered whole unexplored pockets of writers, like the French Creole writers of New Orleans, and many writers and groups of writers who had fallen from grace for various and sundry reasons, their books out of print and out of circulation, their work pretty much erased by history. At some point I discovered the treasure troves inside online preserved copies of Opportunity and Crisis magazines, and other hidden sources. Poems that had no other existence except in faded and crumbling pages of online newsprint.
Then I arrived at the arraignment and description stage. What order would I put them in? Which ones should be clumped together? Were there external arrangements that should be honored, like the Harlem Renaissance or even Reconstruction? And what about subject groupings, like romance, elegies, military service, protest and civil rights, etc.?
Truth is, I am still in the arrangement and description stage. Sometimes the poems themselves seem to have their own ideas about about such things as order and similarity.
I thought about it, a lot, but I’ve decided not to spend a lot of time writing about how and why writers choose the sonnet form to express their thoughts. Plenty of scholars more qualified that I can take you through that discussion in great detail.
I thought about sticking with the old-timers and chose as an arbitrary date a birthday before 1950. But that would exclude me and I had a couple sonnets of my own I strongly wanted to include. Why else anthologize if you can’t include a tiny bit of your own work?
Then I considered the immensity of the work involved in getting permissions from writers whose work was still under copyright. But that might actually be fun, writing letters and emails to those still alive to seek their permission, and keeping track of that correspondence. We shall see, I suppose.
I have tried to leave no stone unturned. If anything, my errors have been Type 2 ones, or over-inclusion, never restricting on so flimsy a basis as race when it is a close call. But I have been exclusive, simply because no other anthology exists, that I can find, devoted exclusively to American American writers of sonnets. And their voices, as many of them as possible, deserve to be heard.