1314 SONG
sounds are considered more difficult than others de­
pending on the number of words that begin with that
sound; alif, b, or d are regarded as easier to compose
in than n or j, with y probably the most difficult and
recognized as such.
Meter in Somali poetry is quantitative and based on
the patterning of long and short vowel syllables and
syllable final consonants, which was first written about
by the poet and scholar Maxamed Xaashi Dhamac
‘Gaarriye’ in 1976. The jiifto meter is the one most
commonly used in mod. hees poetry, and its metrical
patterning is presented here as an example of how the
system works. In the basic pattern, is a metrical
position in which either one long or two short vowel
syllables may occur, and indicates an obligatory short
vowel syllable:
W than read silently. Music, in addition to being the ve­
A short optional vowel syllable might be found
at the beginning of the line or after the first metrical
position when the following syllable has a long vowel
(only one optional syllable is allowed). Syllable final
consonants can occur at the end of metrical positions;
but when a position of the type is realized as two
short vowel syllables, then the first of these syllables
may contain a final consonant only in the first metri­
cal position. E.g., the word dhulka (the earth, ground)
may be found in the first metrical position, as in dhulka
baad kujiifihoo, but not in the other three positions of
the shape The position in which a syllable final
consonant may occur is also the only position in which
a word break may occur and, hence, where the allit­
eration also occurs. Geminate or doubled consonants
are always analyzed as heterosyllabic, so these also may
only occur in these positions as do the consonants sh, s,
f, t, k, j, w, and y, which behave in the meter as gemi­
nate consonants. A large number of metrical patterns
are associated with particular genres of poetry. *Free
verse never emerged in Somali, although some Somali
poetry, particularly that of Cabdi Muxumed Aamiin,
seems to use patterning that does not follow the ac­
cepted meters; this poetry was composed to be sung
to musical accompaniment, however. The demands
of meter and alliteration are used artistically by good
poets as extra raw material with which to enhance their
poems aesthetically, a characteristic that brings value
to poetry in the mind of the audience.
■ B. W. Andrzejewski and I. M. Lewis, Somali Po­
etry: An Introduction (1964); J. C. Ciise, Diwaanka
Gabayadii Sayid Maxamed Cabdulle Xasan (1974);
J. W. Johnson, Heellooy Heelleellooy: The Development
of the Genre Heello in Modern Somali Poetry (1974);
S. S. Samatar, Oral Poetry and Somali Nationalism
(1982); Literature in African Languages, ed. B. W.
Andrzejewski et al. (1985); Poesia orale somala: sto-
ria di una nazione, ed. E Antinucci and A. E Cali
Tdaajaa’ (1986); A. C. Abokor, Somali Pastoral Work
Songs (1993); An Anthology of Somali Poetry, trans.
B. W. Andrzejewski with S. Andrzejewski (1993);
G. Banti and E Giannattasio, “Music and Metre in
Somali Poetry,” and J. Johnson, “Musico-Moro-
Syllabic Relationships in the Scansion of Somali
Oral Poetry,” Voice and Power: The Culture of Lan­
guage in North East Africa, ed. R. J. Hayward and
I. M. Lewis (1996); M. Orwin, “On Consonants in
Somali Metrics,” Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere 65
(2001), and “On the Concept of ‘Definitive Text’ in
Somali Poetry,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and
African Studies 63 (2003); War and Peace: An Anthol­
ogy of Somali Literature, ed. R. S. Cabdillaahi ‘Gadh-
weyne’ (2009); “Night Has Fallen,” trans. M. Orwin,
http://pacoarts.com/PoetLangSite/flashpaper/raagel.
swf.
M. Orwin
SONG (Lat. carmen, Fr. chanson, Ger. Lied). Song re­
fers broadly to the combined effect of music and words
in a composition meant to be heard as music rather
hicle of transmission, frequendy reinforces or enhances
the emotional force of the text as perceived by the
composer of the musical setting. While some songs are
dramatic, song is distinguished from extended com­
positions involving music and text (such as opera) by
its relative brevity. Since most songs are poems set to
music, by extension any poem that is suitable for com­
bination with music or is expressive in ways that might
be construed as musical may also be referred to as song,
and occasionally song is used to designate a stricdy
musical composition without text, deemed “poetic” in
its expressivity or featuring markedly “vocal” melodic
writing for instruments. From the musical standpoint,
song has been restricted almost exclusively to musical
settings ofverse; experiments in setting prose have been
very limited. Further, j^w^has usually been reserved for
compositions for solo voice or a small group of voices
(typically one or two voices to a part) rather than a
full choir and for voice(s) alone or in combination with
one or two instruments rather than a full orchestra. In
any case, the resulting balance, favoring the audibil­
ity of the text and thus appreciation of the nuances of
its combination with music, is a defining characteristic
of the genre; for literary purposes, these characteristics
have also fostered perception of song as personal utter­
ance projecting a limited emotional stance experienced
by a single *persona.
As a literary term, song is related to *lyric, originally
a text or poem sung to the accompaniment of the lyre
and eventually used in lit. in divergent senses to refer,
on the one hand, to any poem actually set or intended
to be set to music (*ditty), and, on the other, to any
poem focusing on the arousal of *emotion as would
be characteristic of the kind of poem typically sung
to the lyre (or to any other musical accompaniment)
as song. Lyric, however, has attained much wider cur­
rency than has jow^and is the commonly accepted term
today for both these meanings, whereas song, as a liter­
ary term, means an utterance partaking in some way of
the condition of music. The musicality of a poem may
be thought of in relation to the ways a text might be in­
terpreted by a musical setting. Some songs correspond
closely to the formal properties of the text (incl. met­
rical, linear, and strophic form), while others empha­

size the semantic properties (rendering the meaning of
individual words or phrases or expressing the tone or
mood of the poem). They need not, of course, exclude
each other; indeed, it is frequendy difficult if not im­
possible to separate what may be a metrical rendering
from its expressive function. The distinction is useful,
however, as some songs favor one or the other, in turn
influencing what are considered song-like elements or
effects in poetry. The association of poetry with music
in the songs of the late Ren. in England offers exam­
ples of both types of correspondence. In some (as in
songs by Thomas Campion, who wrote both words
and music), the rendering of the formal dimensions
of poetry is precise: musical meter is aligned with po­
etic *meter, lines of verse are of uniform length and
set to musical phrases of the same length (words are
not repeated or extended by musical means), and the
strophic *repetition of the poem is rendered through
repetition of music (as in traditional hymn singing).
Poetry that lends itself to settings of this sort is typi­
cally predictable in all these dimensions; hence, such
a poem may be designated song. In the *madrigal and
in some lute songs, by contrast, such formal proper­
ties are likely to be ignored and musical devices instead
correlated with individual words to enhance meaning.
This might mean repetition of words of special poi­
gnancy (“weep, weep”) or highlighting of such words
through exaggerated duration or unusually high or low
*pitch; frequendy such representation is accomplished
through a technique called word-painting, which
aligns individual words with musical figures that can
be said to depict their meaning (a descending scale
for the word down-, a *dissonance for the word grief).
Such practices also lead to predictability, in this case, in
*diction. In the poetic miscellanies of the period, song
and *sonnet sometimes seem to be used interchange­
ably and often refer to poems with one or more of these
characteristics. At worst, they are poems filled with *cli-
che and cloyingly regular in formal properties; at best,
they achieve a delicate balance between the demands of
successful musical rendition and fresh invention.
Songs featuring more general expressivity of mood
or tone in music appear less frequendy in this pe­
riod, although the lutenist-composer John Dowland
achieved some remarkable successes in this mode. Per­
haps most famous is his “Lachrimae,” which existed as
an instrumental composition before being provided
with its now-famous text, “Flow, my tears.” The per­
vasively doleful mood of the piece is created musically
in the accompaniment through its preponderance of
descending melodic lines, its minor harmonies, its low
register, and the slow, deliberate pace of its phrasing;
the poem seems, in effect, to make verbal what the mu­
sical rhet. of emotion suggests. The role of music, then,
in this type of song is less specifically text-dependent
than in other types, and the required balance between
music and poetry depends to a greater extent on the
availability of appropriate instrumental resources to
combine with the voice.
The *lied of 19th-c. Ger. lit. best exemplifies the
fully developed expressive setting. In the hands of
SONG 1315
Franz Schubert, and to a great extent of those who
followed him (Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms,
Hugo Wolf), the role of the accompanying instrument
was enhanced to create a highly emotional song evoca­
tive of the overall tone or mood of the poem. Many
give credit to the devel. of the mod. grand piano for
the success of the lied. Although the notion of expres­
sive setting was not new, as the role of the instrumental
accompaniment in Claudio Monteverdi’s “Combat-
timento di Tancredi e Clorinda” demonstrates, such
pieces violated the required intimacy ofvoice and single
instrument characteristic of song, and it was not until
the devel. of a single instrument with the expressive
range of the piano that this mode of song could flour­
ish. The genre also depended on—and stimulated—a
poetry that provided the appropriate moods, expressed
in terms that could be adequately mimicked by music.
This is found in the poetry of Ger. *romanticism, with
its frequent evocation of nature or of ordinary human
activity as the locus of emotion. For Schubert, the
presence in the poem of a running brook or a woman
spinning wool as the background to an emotion-filled
reverie provided a means for music to enhance what
the poem could only suggest. In this context, poetry
can be said to be song-like if it presents an intense,
sustained, clear, emotional stance, called forth by an
activity that takes place in time. Typically, such poems
feature only one such stance or a decided shift from
one to another; striking *ambiguity or *paradox is less
song-like insofar as these conditions are less readily
imitated in music.
Curiously, poems that depend extensively on the
so-called musicality of words (e.g., Edith Sitwell’s “ab­
stract poetry” and the later experiments in *sound po­
etry) are not necessarily song-like, because the sounds
of the words draw attention to themselves and thereby
detract from the poem’s ability to evoke an emotional
state.
The most extended use of song to refer to a kind of
poetry takes the connection well beyond any mechani­
cal representation or concurrence to questions of intent
or of the relation to strains of creativity. Thus, Maritain
uses song to designate the entire genre of lyric poetry,
as distinct from narrative or dramatic, referring to “the
Poem or the Song as the poetry of internal music... the
immediate expression of creative intuition, the mean­
ing whose intentional content is purely a recess of the
subjectivity awakened to itself and things—perceived
through an obscure, simple, and totally nonconcep-
tual apperception.” Such conceptions of the nature of
song center on the ability of music to tap some source
of understanding or sympathy that is not touched by
lang. Kramer speaks of “the mythical union of a lower
reality embodied in language and a higher one embodied
in music,” stating that “through song, usually the song
of a disincarnate voice or of a figure touched by divin­
ity, lang, is represented as broaching the ineffable”; this
is the sense implied in the use of music to evoke the
supernatural, whether through stricdy instrumental
means or through *charms, as is common in drama.
Music has traditionally been associated with magic
1316 SONG
and with religious experience (despite the objections
at various times of both Catholic and Puritan), and it
is commonly thought of as the lang, of love. The fu­
sion, therefore, of music and poetry in song has been
thought to bring about the most perfect communica­
tion possible, combining the ineffable expressivity of
music with the rational capabilities of words. And by
derivation, poems that are perceived as visionary, con­
juring some understanding beyond the normal capaci­
ties of words, may be called songs. Edmund Spensers
Epithalamion and Prothalamion, William Blake’s Songs
ofInnocence and Experience, and Walt Whitman’s “Song
of Myself” come to mind.
Scholarship on song as music and text frequently fo­
cuses on function and social context. Vernacular song
and folk song, for instance, have generated a huge in­
dependent lit. (not represented in the biblio. below).
Although the distinctions between these and the many
types of so-called art song are not always clear, the pop­
ular genres are less likely to have strong literary connec­
tions. Similarly, the literary connection is clearest with
secular song, though the relations between music and
text in sacred song run the same gamut as in secular.
All song types, however, lend themselves well to critical
methodologies of recent prominence (such as feminism
or *New Historicism) and a growing number of com­
parative explorations of song lit. of other cultures has
emerged.
Song has also come to designate certain purely musi­
cal compositions, presumably those, like poems called
“song,” that partake in some measure of the shared expe­
rience of music and poetry. Most frequent in this usage
are such 19th-c. compositions as Felix Mendelssohn’s
“Songs without Words” for piano—short, expressive
pieces, typically with a striking, singable melody and
the sense that one could describe in words a suitable
emotional frame of reference. Their proximity to the
lied is probably not coincidence; song, or lied, in that
context describes that combination of words and music
producing a compressed and intense expression of the
rhet. of emotion, and if words are merely implied,
the effect is nevertheless present and the composition
known as “song.”
Several specialized types of song, established by use,
have similarly given their names to poetic types, esp.
*elegy, *lament, *hymn, lay or *lai, *ballad, *carol,
*rondeau, and canzonet.
See AIR, ALBA, BLUES, CACOPHONY, CANSO, CARMEN,
CHANT, DESCORT, GESELLSCHAFTSLIED, JAZZ POETRY, MUSIC
AND POETRY, RHYTHM, SOUND, SPIRITUAL, TAGELIED.
■ Song as Music: E Gennrich, Grundriss einer For-
menlehre des mittelalterlichen Liedes (1932); J. Maritain,
Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (1953); R. Lebeque,
“Ronsard et la musique,” Musique etpoesie au XVI siecle
(1954); G. Muller and G. Reichert, “Lied,” Reallexikon II
2.42-62; D. Cooke, The Language of Music (1959);
A. Sydow, Das Lied (VIST)', C. M. Bowra, Primitive Song
(1962); R. H. Thomas, Poetry andSong in the German Ba­
roque (1963); The Penguin Book ofLieder, ed. S. S. Prawer
(1964); R. Taylor, Ihe Art of the Minnesinger (1968);
B. H. Bronson, Ihe Ballad as Song (1969); D. Ivey, Song
(1970)—on musical settings of Eng., Fr., Ger., and It.
poetry, 17th-20th cs.; E. Brody and R. A. Fowkes, The
German Lied and Its Poetry (1971); J. M. Stein, Poem
and Music in the German Lied (1971); M. C. Beards­
ley, “Verse and Music,” Wimsatt; H. van der Werf,
The Chansons of the Troubadours and Trouveres (1972);
D. Fischer-Dieskau, Schuberts Songs: A Biographical
Study (1977); Medieval English Songs, ed. E. J. Dob­
son and F. LI. Harrison (1979); “Song” and “Lied,”
New Grove', M. Booth, The Experience of Songs (1981);
R. C. Friedberg, American Art Song and American Po­
etry, 2 v. (1981); S. Ratcliffe, Campion: On Song (1981);
J. A. Winn, Unsuspected Eloquence: A History ofthe Re­
lations between Poetry and Music (1981); E. B. Jorgens,
The Well-Tun’d Word: Musical Interpretations ofEnglish
Poetry, 1597—1651 (1982); L. Kramer, Music and Poetry:
The Nineteenth Century and After (1984); S. Banfield,
Sensibility and English Song: Critical Studies ofthe Early
Twentieth Century, 2 v. (1985); M. M. Stoljar, Poetry
and Song in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany (1985);
E. Doughtie, English Renaissance Song (1986); W. May­
nard, Elizabethan Lyric Poetry and Its Music (1986);
J. Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle Ages (1986);
D. Seaton, The Art Song: A Research and Information
Guide (1987)—esp. “Aesthetics, Analysis, Criticism”;
J. W. Smeed, German Song and Its Poetry, 1740—1900
(1987); D. M. Hertz, The Tuning of the Word (1988);
Lyrics of the Middle Ages, ed. J. J. Wilhelm (1990);
L. E. Auld, “Text as Pre-Text: French Court Airs and
Their Ditties,” Literature and the Other Arts (1993);
S. Hart, “Masking the Violence in Melody: Songs of
World War II,” The Image of Violence in Literature,
the Media, and Society, ed. W. Wright and S. Kaplan
(1995); M. L. Switten, Music and Poetry in the Middle
Ages (1995); S. Zheng, “Female Heroes and Moonish
Lovers: Women’s Paradoxical Identities in Modern
Chinese Songs,” Journal of Womens History 8 (1997);
D. Fischlin, In Small Proportions: A Poetics of the En­
glish Ayre, 1596—1622 (1998); D. Schaberg, “Song and
the Historical Imagination in Early China,” HJAS
59 (1999); P. Coren, “Singing and Silence: Female
Personae in the English Ayre,” Renaissance Studies 16
(2002).
■ Song in Literature: T. S. Eliot, The Music ofPoetry
(1942); W. R. Bowden, The English Dramatic Lyric,
1603—42Q95ty,]. Hollander, The Untuning ofthe Sky:
Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500—1700 (1961);
P. J. Seng, The Vocal Songs in the Plays of Shakespeare
(1967); E. Garke, The Use of Songs in Elizabethan
Prose Fiction (1972); J. H. Long, Shakespeare’s Use of
Music (1972); C. Ericson-Roos, The Songs of Robert
Burns (1977); B. H. Fairchild, Such Holy Song: Music
as Idea, Form, and Image in the Poetry of William
Blake (1980); W. R. Johnson, The Idea ofLyric (1982);
L. Schleiner, The Living Lyre in English Verse from
Elizabeth through the Restoration (1984); E. H. Wink­
ler, The Function of Song in Contemporary British
Drama (1990).
E. B. Jorgens

SONGBOOK. A multiauthored *lyric *anthology
in a ms. codex volume of parchment leaves bound
as a book, or printed book that displays an inten­
tion to gather and organize discrete (usually vernacu­
lar) lyric texts into a collection. Songbooks range from
anthols. occupying only a few folios within a larger
volume to large compilations coextensive with an en­
tire codex. Given that all short med. texts are trans­
mitted either in miscellanies (ranging from haphazard
or practical incorporation to collections assembled on
commission or speculation by a patron) or anthols.
(items brought together according to some intelligible
governing principle), the songbooks considered pre­
cursors to mod. eds. are the collections of individual
nonnarrative poems in stanzaic form rather than single­
author anthols., narrative anthols. in octosyllabic
*couplets (such as the OF romance or ^dit), or prose
works that share thematic similarities with the *courtly
love song. In the devel. of Western poetry, the most
significant songbooks in terms of their typical quali­
ties are the monumental mss. of the continental trad,
compiled from the 13th c. on, such as the chansonniers
of *troubadour and *trouvere poetry and Liederhand-
schriften of Ger. Minnesdnger. These scribally compiled,
multiauthored anthols. preserve and memorialize
a lyric production that had been mostly transmit­
ted orally since the beginning of the 12th c. They are
among the earliest collections of secular lyric poetry in
the Eur. vernaculars, and they organize lyric texts writ­
ten out in prose by *genre ^cansos, ^sirventes, *tensor
later formes fixes such as the motet and ^canciori) and
by *poet. While some contain musical notation, many
songbooks of the Eur. vernaculars such as the Occitan
chansonniers and MHG Liederhandschriften transmit
only lyrics. In this way, these trads. differ notably from
the Fr. chansonniers, which tend to preserve melodies
and lyrics. Even when songbooks group nonlyric texts
such as the biographies of poets in Occitan chanson­
niers vidas) or prose commentaries ^razos) with
lyrics to memorialize a trad, or collate heterogeneous
elements of genre or lang, (long, moralizing texts with
* chansons, Occitan and Fr.), they were compiled to
manifest a deliberate coherence in their reading pro­
grams as a single entity while maintaining a variety
of discrete pieces of poetry. As Huot has shown, the
compilations often demonstrate a narrative or thematic
coherence while emphasizing individual authors. In
addition to being carefully organized under genre and
author, songbooks often contain rubricated initials and
miniatures, such as distinctive portraits of troubadours
or more typical ones of aristocrats, clergy, or knights.
In their comprehensive plans for rubrication—in par­
ticular, the importance of the figure of the poet—and
attention to lit. hist., they are cultural objects in their
own right while also serving as a vehicle for preserving
poetry. They reflect a new consciousness of vernacular
lyric as an object of study and codification. While the
continental Eur. songbook trad, generally emphasizes
authorial expression in contrast to the ME anthols. of
mostly anonymous lyrics collated with other kinds of
SONGBOOK 1317
writing (such as prayers and hagiographies in the early
14th-c. Harley 2253 ms.), songbooks express an aes­
thetic motivation or design of a whole greater than the
sum of its parts. Thus, even as the term songbook may
be a misnomer as assigned to a compilation of nonlyric
and lyric texts or to an anthol. contained within a sec­
tion of a ms. rather than the entire codex, one may
perceive a songbook as both compiling lyric poems
and exhibiting the presence of artificial principles by
which a reader may interpret those poems. As Nichols
(1990) and Lerer have argued, such principles may be
perceived in a ms.’s performance—through or despite
the physical “manuscript matrix” of dissimilar materi­
als from various points of time—or when the “idea of
the anthology,” the social, historical or literary pur­
poses of a collection, become clear whether by textual
disposition, organization, rubrication, or illustration.
Despite attempts in the 19th c. to establish stem-
mata of written sources that make a songbook, the
mod. scholarly consensus is that the earliest vernacular
songbooks are a combination of both oral and writ­
ten transmission, as generally we lack early exemplars
or song sheets; the textual variability of lyric texts in
the mss. attests to an early stage of oral transmission
and the performance of these lyrics as remembered im­
provisation (Holmes, Paden 1995, Van Vleck). While
songbooks would have been assembled from different
sources, incl. both local and circulating ur-models used
for multiple collections, their compilation gready con­
tributed to the stabilization of the lyric trad, and the
devel. of single-authored compilations of lyric cycles
(Holmes). Older mss. such as the OF ms. U (Huot)
show an earlier stage of lyric anthols. in that the lyrics
are anonymous, are more randomly organized, and lack
the illumination and generic organization that codify
a lyric trad. Despite this range of editorial intention,
songbooks differ from the earliest instances of vernac­
ular lyric that contain these texts in the margins and
flyleaves of ecclesiastical or legal codices (see Occitan
lyrics in Paden and Paden; ms. 201, folio 89 verso and
vernacular lyric in England in Thomson and Gullick) or
include them in heterogeneous vernacular miscellanies
based primarily on principles such as subject matter
or practical considerations of accessibility. Songbooks
may also be seen as contiguous with the trad, of middle
Lat. songbooks incorporating vernacular texts, such as
the Carmina Burana and the earlier Carolingian flores
auctorum. Nichols (1996) believes the pandect, since
the 6th c. a term for compilations of laws and later
sacred writings, also provided a model for songbooks.
With the rise of vernacular literacy in western Eu­
rope during the 13th c., songbooks became a symbol of
cultural prestige, as patrons and composers of lyric po­
etry in It., Iberian, and Ger. courts looked to associate
themselves with a courdy mythology of poetic trad. In
general, songbooks not only catalog lyrics but docu­
ment and archive the social and cultural context from
which the lyrics arose through their rubrication and
commentary (Burgwinkle). In the case of troubadour
chansonniers compiled in Italy, these mss. reflect the
1318 SONNET
desire of It. aristocrats to establish a written trad, of
a lyric poetry even as it was still orally transmitted in
Occitan-speaking areas of southern France and north­
ern Spain. Codices of the 14th c. and after, such as the
large Heidelberg ms. of the MHG trad, known as the
Codex Manesse and the 15th-c. Castilian *cancioneros,
establish the songbook as a literary genre. Songbooks
became a means of cultural self-justification for aristo­
crats and lettered men with social ambitions: the com­
position and publication of poetry in songbooks (mss.
and then printed codices—see Dutton and Krogstad’s
bibl.) constituted an important courtly pastime. The in­
dividual songbook often represented a poetic coterie or
particular court as was the case in the 15th- and 16th-c.
Castilian cancioneros (see Gerli and Weiss, Dutton and
Krogstad). Further, the codices of the troubadour trad,
served as models for later It. lyric collections and for
poets such as Dante and Petrarch (see petrarchism).
Many scholars have noted that, as visual repre­
sentations of oral poems and musical performances,
songbooks show codicological practices and cultural
agendas that have much to do with the formation of
lyric trads. The arrangement of vernacular poetry in
anthols. was an impetus for the idea of the author as
the foundation of a literary *canon; it also affected the
evolution of lyric genres, from the priority of the aristo­
cratic chanson to formesfixes. The idea of the songbook
belongs to the mod. reevaluation of so-called canoni­
cal works, as songbooks represent how much a canon
and lit. itself are material and social products of times
and places, and a category such as poet a social con­
struction that reflects different lyric audiences (Hanna,
Guillory). Thus, a discrete single literary work must
be seen in relation to its mode of transmission and to
other works in an assembly of works such as a song­
book. In the mod. era, songbooks came to represent a
culture of lyric poetry that could reinforce a geographi­
cal or ling, identity, such as the Galician-Port, cancio-
neiros for the Iberian trad, or Liederhandschriften for
Ger.-speaking people. In this sense, during the 19th c.,
songbooks were implicated in the romantic search for
ling, and national identity, as they reflected the desire
to justify cultural or regional origins through ling, ar­
tifacts (Kendrick).
Whether determined by scribe, patron, or poet,
the songbook—and by extension the textual crit. of
songbooks—reflects cultural preoccupations govern­
ing the interpretation of poetry and its social role in
different historical periods.
See LYRIC SEQUENCE, MINNESANG, SONNET SEQUENCE.
H G. Grober, “Die Liedersammlungen der Trouba­
dours,” Romanische Studien 2 (1875-77); D. S. Avalle,
La letteratura medievale in lingua d’oc nella sua tra-
dizione manoscritta (1961); A. Paredes, A Texas-Mexican
Cancionero (1976); Codex Manesse: Die Grosse Heidel-
berger Liederhandschrift, Facsimile of Codex Palatinus
Germanicus 848 of the Universitatsbibliothek Heidel­
berg, with “Interimstexten” from I. F. Walther (1975—
78), commentary, ed. W. Koschorreck and W. Werner
(1981); E. Poe, From Poetry to Prose in Old Provencal:
The Emergence of the “Vidas, ” the “Razos, ” and the
“Razos de trobar” (1984); J. Boffey, Manuscripts ofEarly
Courtly Love Lyrics in the Later Middle Ages (1985); J.
Guillory, “Canonical and Non-Canonical: A Critique
of the Debate,” ELH 54 (1987); S. Huot, From Song
to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and
Lyrical Narrative Poetry (1987); S. G. Nichols, “Intro­
duction: Philology in a Manuscript Culture,” Speculum
65 (1990); El cancionero del siglo XV, c. 1360—1520, ed.
B. Dutton and J. Krogstad, 7 v. (1990—91); T. Stemm­
ier, “Miscellany or Anthology: The Structure of Me­
dieval Manuscripts, MS Harley 2253, for Example,”
Zeitschrifi fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik 39 (1991);
rev. in Fein (2000); A. Roncaglia, “Retrospectives
et perspectives dans 1’etude des chansonniers d’oc,”
Lyrique romane medievale: La tradition des chanson­
niers: Actes du Colloque du Liege, 1989, ed. M. Tyssens
(1991); A. E. Van Vleck, Memory and Re-Creation in
Troubadour Lyric (1991); W. D. Paden, “Manuscripts,”
A Handbook ofthe Troubadours, ed. F.R.P Akehurst and
J. M. Davis (1995); The Whole Book: Cultural Perspec­
tives on the Medieval Miscellany, ed. S. G. Nichols and
S. Wenzel (1996)—esp. Nichols, “Art’ and ‘Nature’:
Looking for (Medieval) Principles of Order in Occitan
Chansonnier N (Morgan 819)”; R. Hanna III, Pursu­
ing History: Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts
(1996); Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed.
R. H. Bloch and S. G. Nichols (1996)—esp. L. Kend­
rick, “The Science of Imposture and the Professional­
ization of Medieval Occitan Literary Studies”; Poetry
at Court in Trastamaran Spain: From the “Cancionero
de Baena” to the “Cancionero General? ed. E. M. Gerli
and J. Weiss (1998); W. Burgwinkle, “The Chanson­
niers as Books,” The Troubadours: An Introduction, ed.
S. Gaunt and S. Kay (1999); O. Holmes, Assembling the
Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian
Poetry Book (2000); Studies in the Harley Manuscript,
ed. S. Fein (2000); R. M. Thomson and M. Gullick,
A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts
in Worcester Cathedral Library (2001); S. Lerer, “Me­
dieval English Literature and the Idea of the Anthol­
ogy,” PMLA 118 (2003); J.H.M. Taylor, The Making of
Poetry: Late-Medieval French Poetic Anthologies (2007);
Troubadour Poems from the South ofFrance, ed. W. D.
Paden and E F. Paden (2007); G. Kornrumpf, Vom
Codex Manesse zur Kolmarer Liederhandschrift: As-
pekte der Uberlieferung, Formtraditionen, Texte (2008);
M. Galvez, Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Me­
dieval Europe (2012).
M. Galvez
SONNET (from It. sonetto, “a little sound or song”).
A 14-line line poem normally in *hendecasyllables (It.),
iambic pentameter (Eng.), or *alexandrines (Fr.), whose
rhyme scheme varies despite the assumption that the
sonnet form is fixed. The three most widely recognized
versions of the sonnet, with their traditional rhyme
schemes, are the It. or Petrarchan (octave: abbaabba-,
sestet: cdecde or cdcdcd or a similar combination that
avoids the closing couplet), the Spenserian (ababbcbc
cdcdee), and the Eng. or Shakespearean (ababcdcdefef
gg). Weeks showed in a sample of just under 6,000

Eng. sonnets that 60% used the abbaabba pattern for
the octaves and 22% ababcdcd.
The It. pattern (the most widely used) invites a two-
part division of thought: the octave’s unified pattern
leads to the *volta or “turn” in the more varied sestet.
The abbaabba octave is a blend of three brace-rhyme
quatrains: the middle four lines, whose sounds overlap
the others, reiterate the identical envelope pattern but
with the sounds reversed, i.e., baab. The sestet, with
its element of unpredictability, its usually more intense
rhyme activity (three rhymes in six lines coming after
two in eight), and the structural interdependence of
the tercets, implies acceleration in thought and feeling.
The Spenserian and Shakespearean patterns offer re­
lief to the difficulty of rhyming in Eng. and invite a di­
vision of thought into three quatrains and a closing or
summarizing couplet; even though such arbitrary divi­
sions are frequendy ignored by the poet, the more open
rhyme schemes tend to impress the fourfold structure
on the reader’s ear and to suggest a stepped progression
toward the closing couplet.
Most deviations from the foregoing patterns have
resulted from liberties taken in rhyming, but a few in­
novations of the sonnet are the following: alternating,
where the tercets alternate with the quatrains (Catulle
Mendes); * caudate, with “tails” of added lines (G. M.
Hopkins, Albert Samain, R. M. Rilke); chained or
linked, each line beginning with the last word of the
previous line; continuous, iterating, or monorhymed on
one or two rhyme sounds throughout (Giacomo da
Lentini, Stephane Mallarme, Edmund Gosse); *co­
rona, a series joined together by theme (It.) or rhyme
or repeated lines (Sp. and Eng., e.g., John Donne) for
*panegyric; *curtal, a sonnet of ten lines with a halfline
tailpiece, divided 6 + 414 (Hopkins); dialogue, a son­
net distributed between two speakers and usually *pas-
toral in inspiration (Cecco Angiolieri, Austin Dobson);
double, a sonnet of 28 lines (Monte Andrea); enclosed,
in which the tercets are sandwiched between the qua­
trains (Charles Baudelaire, Jean Pierre Rambosson);
interwoven, with medial as well as end rhyme; retro­
grade, reading the same backward as forward; reversed
(also called sonettessa), in which the sestet precedes the
octave (Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Ricarda Huch)—for
a reversed Shakespearean sonnet, see Rupert Brooke’s
“Sonnet Reversed”; rinterzato, a sonnet with eight short
lines interspersed, making a whole of 22 lines (Guit-
tone d’Arezzo); ^terza rima, with the linked-tercets aba
bcb rhyme scheme; unrhymed, where the division into
quatrains and tercets is still observed, but the lines are
blank (Joachim du Bellay, J. R. Becher). In Eng., the
16-line poems of George Meredith’s sequence Modern
Love (1862) are clearly related to the sonnet in their
themes and abbacddceffeghhg rhyme scheme.
Historically, the sonnet began as some variant of the
It. pattern; it is probable that the form resulted either
from the addition of a double refrain of six lines (two
tercets) to the two-quatrain Sicilian ^strambotto or from
conscious modeling on the form of the *canzone. The
current form of the sonnet originated in the Sicilian
court of Frederick II (1205—50), with 60 of the Sicilian
SONNET 1319
school’s sonnets in existence today. The sonnets of Gia­
como da Lentini (fl. 1215-33) were followed by those
of Guido Guinizzelli and Guido Cavalcanti. Although
others of Lentini’s contemporaries (the Abbot of Tivoli,
Jacopo Mostacci, Pier delle Vigne, Rinaldo d’Aquino)
used the form and established the octave-sestet divi­
sions (with quatrain-tercet subdivisions), it remained
for d’Arezzo (1230-94) to invent the abbaabba octave,
which became traditional through its use by Dante
{Vita nuova, Rime) and Petrarch {Canzoniere)-, Antonio
da Tempo, in his Summa artis rithmici (1332), is the
first to enunciate theoretical discussion of the sonnet as
a type. The sonnets of Dante to Beatrice and of Petrarch
to Laura normally opened with a strong statement that
was then developed; but they were not unmarked by
the artificiality of treatment that stemmed from varia­
tions on the Platonic love themes, an artificiality that
was to be exported with the form in the 15 th and 16th
cs. as the sonnet moved to Spain, Portugal, the Neth­
erlands, Poland, and England, and later to Germany,
Scandinavia, and Russia, until its use was pan-Eur. and
the number of poets not attempting it negligible. The
sonnet entered the Heb. lang, (in hendecasyllables) in
Italy and Spain, as a primary form in which rhyme en­
tered its poetry, esp. in sonnets by Immanuel of Rome
at the end of the 13th to the beginning of the 14th c.
Following Petrarch, there was in Italy some diminution
of dignity in use of the form (as in Serafino dall’Aquila
[1466-1500]), but with the work of Michelangelo, Pi­
etro Bembo, Baldassare Castiglione, Gaspara Stampa,
Vittoria Colonna, and Torquato Tasso, the sonnet was
reaffirmed as a structure admirably suited to the expres­
sion of emotion in lyrical mood, adaptable to a wide
range of subject matter (e.g., love, politics, religion),
and employed with skill by many writers in the cen­
turies to follow (Vittorio Alfieri, Ugo Foscolo, Giosue
Carducci, Gabriele D’Annunzio).
It was the Marques de Santillana (1398-1458), who
introduced the sonnet form (in hendecasyllables, even)
to Spain, although it was not established there until
the 16th c., the time of Juan Boscan (ca. 1490-1542)
and esp. Garcilaso de la Vega (1503—36), Felix Lope
de Vega (1562-1635), and other dramatists of the siglo
de oro. Francisco Sa de Miranda (1481-1558) and his
disciple Antonio Ferreira brought the sonnet to Por­
tugal, where it is better known in the Rimas of Luis de
Camoes (1524-80) and in the exquisite work of Antero
de Quental (1842—91). Clement Marot (1496—1544)
and Mellin de Saint Gelais (1491-1558) introduced it
to France, but du Bellay (ca. 1522-60) was most active,
writing (in the Petrarchan pattern) the first non-Italian
cycle, L’Olive, as well as Les Regrets and Les Antiqui-
tes de Rome (trans, by Edmund Spenser as The Ruins
of Rome, a source for Shakespeare’s sonnets). Pierre
de Ronsard (1524-85), who experimented with the
form in alexandrines, Philippe Desportes (1546-1606),
and Louise Labe (1522-66) wrote many sonnets, while
Francois de Malherbe (1555-1628) put his authority
behind the abbaabbaccdede pattern in alexandrines,
which became the accepted line length. After an era
of decline in Europe in the 18th c., Theophile Gautier
1320 SONNET
(1811-72), Gerard de Nerval (1808-55), and Baudelaire
(1821-67) revived the form, as did Verlaine, Mallarme,
Arthur Rimbaud, J.-M. de Heredia (1842-1905),
and Paul Valery (1871-1945). Germany received the
form relatively late, in the writings of G. R. Weckherlin
(1584-1653) and, esp. insofar as creative achievement
is concerned, Andreas Gryphius (1616-64). A period
of disuse followed until Gottfried Burger (1747-94)
revived the form and anticipated its use by A. W.
Schlegel, J. E Eichendorff, Ludwig Tieck, and other ro­
mantic writers. The sonnets of August Graf von Platen
(1796—1835), Sonette aus Venedig, rank among the best
in mod. times, while in more recent years the mystical
sequence Sonette an Orpheus (1923) of Rilke and the
writings of R. A. Schroder have brought the Ger. son­
net to another high point.
The sonnet arrived in England from Italy via
Thomas Wyatt (1503-42), who preferred the sestet’s
closing couplet. Wyatt adhered to the Petrarchan
octave; Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey (1517-47),
established the ababcdcdefefgg rhyme scheme, a pattern
more congenial to the comparatively rhyme-poor Eng.
lang, in that it filled the 14 lines by seven rhymes, not
five. This pattern was popular in the Ren. Wide varia­
tion existed in rhyme schemes and line lengths; Shake­
speare was its best practitioner. A rhyme scheme more
attractive to Spenser (and in its first nine lines par­
alleling his *Spenserian stanza) was ababbcbccdcdee, a
compromise between It. and Eng. patterns. The period
also saw many *sonnet sequences, including those of
Philip Sidney (Astrophil and Stella, pub. 1591), Sam­
uel Daniel (Delia), Michael Drayton (Idea), Spenser
(Amoretti), Lady Mary Wroth (Pamphilia to Amphilan-
thus), and Shakespeare. It remained for John Milton to
introduce the true It. pattern, to break from sequences
to occasional sonnets, to have a wider sense of content,
to give greater unity to the form by frequently permit­
ting octave to run into sestet (the “Miltonic” sonnet
anticipated by the Elizabethans), and to give a greater
richness to the texture by employing *enjambment.
And sonnet-like structures of 14 lines have even been
discerned in the stichic verse of Paradise Lost, a prac­
tice later echoed by William Wordsworth and Thomas
Hardy (Johnson 1982). Mil ton’s was the strongest in­
fluence when, after a century of disuse, the sonnet was
revived in the late 18th c. by Thomas Gray, Thomas
Warton, William Cowper, and William Lisle Bowles
and reestablished in the early 19th by Wordsworth
(who eased rhyme demands by use of an abbaacca
octave in nearly half of his more than 500 sonnets),
by Anna Seward, and by John Keats, whose frequent
use of the Shakespearean pattern reaffirmed its wor­
thiness. By this time, the scope of sonnet themes had
broadened widely; in Leigh Hunt and Keats, it even
embraced an unaccustomed humor. Sonnet theory
was also developing tentatively during this period (as
in Hunt’s “Essay on the Sonnet”) to eventuate in an
unrealistic purism in T.W.H. Crosland’s The English
Sonnet (1917) before it was later more temperately ap­
proached. Since the impetus of the romantic revival,
the form has had a continuing and at times distin­
guished use, as in D. G. Rossetti (The House ofLife),
Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Son­
nets from the Portuguese), and A. C. Swinburne. Few
poets of the 20th c. (W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas,
Geoffrey Hill, and Seamus Heaney might be named)
matched the consistent level of production found in
the earlier work, although an occasional single sonnet,
such as W. B. Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” has rare
beauty.
While sonnets were ubiquitous in the colonial
Americas, the form did not appear in New England
until the last quarter of the 18th c., in the work of Col.
David Humphreys, but once introduced, the form
spread rapidly if not distinctively until H. W. Longfel­
low (1807-82), using the It. pattern, lifted it in dignity
and lyric tone (esp. in the Divina commedia sequence)
to a level easily equal to its counterpart in England.
Subsequently, E. A. Robinson, Robert Frost, Claude
McKay (born in Jamaica), Edna St. Vincent Millay,
e. e. cummings, and Robert Lowell, among others,
produced memorable sonnets, as have more recent
Am. and Eng.-lang. poets such as Ted Berrigan, James
K. Baxter (New Zealand), Rafael Campo, Anne Carson
(Canada), Tony Harrison (England), Marilyn Hacker,
John Hollander, Edwin Morgan (Scotland), and Ber­
nadette Mayer.
In the 20th and early 21st cs., sonnets have con­
tinued to broaden to include almost any subject and
mood. Structurally, even within the traditional pat­
terns, the sonnet has reflected the principal influences
evident in mod. poetry as a whole: *free-verse inno­
vations have frequently led to less metronomic move­
ment within the iambic norm; alternatives to exact
rhymes have replenished the stock of rhyme pairs and
have sophisticated acoustic relationships; and a more
natural idiom has removed much of a burdensome ar­
tificiality. Such adaptability suggests continued interest
in and use of the form.
See ONEGIN STANZA, PETRARCHISM, QUATORZAIN.
■ H. Welti, Gesch. des Sonettes in der deutschen Dich-
tung (1884); Schipper, 2.835 ff; L. Biadene, Morfolo-
gia del sonetto nei secoli XIII e XIV (1889); Sonnets on
the Sonnet, ed. M. Russell (1898); M. Jasinski, Histoire
du sonnet en France (1903); L. T. Weeks, “The Order
of Rimes of the English Sonnet,” MLN 25 (1910)—
data; Thieme, 381 ff—lists 17 Fr. works, 1548-1903;
F. Villey, “Marot et le premier sonnet fran^ais,”
Revue d’Histoire Litteraire de la France 20 (1920);
R. D. Havens, The Influence of Milton on English Po­
etry (1922)—surveys 18th- and 19th-c. Eng. sonnets;
W. L. Bullock, “The Genesis of the English Sonnet
Form,” PMLA 38 (1923); L. G. Sterner, The Sonnet
in American Literature (1930); L. Zillman, John Keats
and the Sonnet Tradition (1939); W. Monch, Das Sonett
(1955)—most comprehensive study to date, with ex­
tended bibl.; E. Rivers, “Certain Formal Characteris­
tics of the Primitive Love Sonnet,” Speculum 33 (1958);
E. H. Wilkins, The Invention of the Sonnet and Other
Studies in Italian Literature (1959); E. Nunez Mata,
Historia y origen del soneto (1967); S. Booth, An Essay
on Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1969); Das deutsche Sonett, ed.

J. U. Fechner (1969); J. Levy, “The Development of
Rhyme-Scheme and of Syntactic Pattern in the English
Renaissance Sonnet,” “On the Relations of Language
and Stanza Pattern in the English Sonnet,” rpt. in his
Paralipomena (1971); M. Fran^on, “LTntroduction du
sonnet en France,” RPh 26 (1972); J. Fuller, The Son­
net (1972); L. M. Johnson, Wordsworth and the Sonnet
(1973); F. Jost, “The Sonnet in its European Context,”
Introduction to Comparative Literature (1974); Wilkins;
R. L. Colie, Shakespeares Living Art (1974); C. Scott,
“The Limits of the Sonnet,” RLC 50 (1976); E Kim-
mich, “Sonnets before Opitz,” German Quarterly 49
(1976); D. H. Scott, Sonnet Theory and Practice in
Nineteenth-Century France (1977); H.-J. Schliitter,
Sonett (1979); S. Hornsby and J. R. Bennett, “The
Sonnet: An Annotated Bibliography from 1940 to the
Present,” Style 13 (1979); J. Geninasca, “Forme fixe
et forme discursive dans quelques sonnets de Baude­
laire,” Cahiers de [Association internationale des etudes
fran^aises 32 (1980); Brogan, 455 ff.; Fowler; L. M.
Johnson, Wordsworth’s Metaphysical Verse (1982)—
blank-verse sonnets; Russkij sonet, ed. B. Romanov, and
Russkij sonet, ed. V S. Sovalin (both 1983)—anthols.;
Elwert, Italienische, sect. 83; F. Rigolot, “Qu’est-ce
qu’un sonnet?” Revue dHistoire Litteraire de la France
84 (1984) C. Kleinhenz, The Early Italian Sonnet
(1986); Hollier; S. L. Bermann, The Sonnet over Time
(1989)—Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Baudelaire; P. Op­
penheimer, The Birth of the Modern Mind (1989); G.
Warkentin, “Sonnet, Sonnet Sequence,” The Spenser
Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (1990); A. L.
Martin, Cervantes and the Burlesque Sonnet (1991); Six
Masters of the Spanish Sonnet, ed. and trans. W. Barn­
stone (1992); M.R.G. Spiller, The Development of the
Sonnet (1992); D. Bregman, The Golden Way (1995)—
Heb. sonnet; Moirer; H. Vendler, The Art of Shake­
speares Sonnets (1998); The Oxford Book ofSonnets, ed.
J. Fuller (2000); Penguin Book of the Sonnet, ed.
P. Levin (2001); The Making ofa Sonnet, ed. E. Boland
and E. Hirsch (2008); The Reality Street Book of Son­
nets, ed. J. Hilson (2009); S. Burt and D. Mikics, The
Art ofthe Sonnet (2010); The Cambridge Companion to
the Sonnet, ed. P. Howarth (2010).
T.V.F. Brogan; L. J. Zillman; C. Scott; J. Lewin
SONNET SEQUENCE. A subset of the *lyric se­
quence consisting of a series of *sonnets, of any num­
ber, that may be organized according to some fictional
or intellectual order. The sequence made entirely of
sonnets is rarer than readers often suppose and seldom
holds an author’s or a culture’s attention for long before
deliberate variations emerge. The rise of the sonnet se­
quence in most Eur. langs, coincides with that of *Pe-
trarchism: because Petrarch’s late 14th-c. Canzoniere is
made largely but not exclusively of sonnets (317 of 366
poems), many of its imitators and adapters in Fr., Eng.,
Port., and Sp. saw their roles as involving the domesti­
cation of his sonnet form; hence, the first Petrarchans
in the vernaculars (e.g., Thomas Wyatt and Henry
Howard, the Earl of Surrey, in Eng.) are often the first
sonneteers in their langs, as well (e.g., Joachim du Bellay
SONNET SEQUENCE 1321
and Pierre de Ronsard in Fr., Francisco Sa de Mi­
randa and Luis de Camoes in Port., Juan Boscan and
Garcilaso de la Vega in Sp.). The most extreme vogue
for sonnet sequences was that of Eng. poets in the later
16th c.: examples include Thomas Watson’s Hekatom-
pathia of 18-line sonnets (1582); Philip Sidney’s Astro-
phil and Stella (written early 1580s, pub. 1591); Edmund
Spenser’s Ruins of Rome (1591—an adaptation of du
Bellay’s Antiquites de Rome [1558] and drawn upon by
Shakespeare) and Amoretti (with its completing Epitha-
lamion [1595]); Henry Constable’s Diana (1592); Sam­
uel Daniel’s Delia (1592); Michael Drayton’s much
revised Idea (1593); and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (written
1590s, pub. 1609). In the 17th c., while poets such as
the Spaniard Francisco de Quevedo, Sidney’s niece
Mary Wroth, and the Mexican nun Sor Juana Ines de
la Cruz continue to extend the reach of the amatory
and philosophical sonnet sequence, the orientation of
the sequence at large (like that of the lyric sequence)
turns toward *devotional poetry. Aside from Quevedo
and John Donne, notable religious sonneteers inch the
Ger. Andreas Gryphius, the It. Tommaso Campanella,
the Dutchman Constantijn Huygens, and the French­
man Jean de La Ceppede.
In the early mod. period generally, the sonnet se­
quence is often thought to have a special, almost
automatic claim to overall integrity—whether topi­
cal (as in du Bellay’s Les Regrets [1558]), meditative
(as in the *“corona” used by Donne and others), or
vaguely chronological (as in the common usage of the
Eng. word century for 100 sonnets). As scholars such
as Warley and Alduy have demonstrated, the sonnet
sequence can be as much a political and economic as
a literary construction—an arena or marketplace for
the working out of collective interests; earlier schol­
ars have dwelt on its character as a ritual experience, a
type of public space, and an art form with analogues in
painting, religion, and architecture, among other dis­
ciplines. The job of cultural mediation enacted by the
sonnet sequence perhaps indicates why poetic amateurs
of note—such as the It. sculptor and painter Michel­
angelo Buonarroti in the 1530s and 1540s, the Eng.
Puritan polemicist Henry Lock in the 1590s, or the
Am. philosopher George Santayana in the 1890s—are
drawn to this form as a uniquely deprivileged space:
it enables them to think through emotional, philo­
sophical, or religious issues in a formally determined,
publicly accessible medium. In fact, the first sonnet
sequence in Eng.—Anne Lock’s Meditation ofa Penitent
Sinner (1560), inspired by the Scottish Puritan John
Knox—is the ideologically charged work of a poetic
amateur, intervening in contemp. religious debates in
the mode of a deeply personal meditation (Roche).
Like the lyric sequence, the sonnet sequence seems
to have had few important instances in the 18th c. but
became a major romantic and postromantic vehicle.
Notable examples incl. William Wordworth’s several
sonnet sequences.; E. B. Browning’s Sonnets from the
Portuguese (1850); George Meredith’s narrative Mod­
ern Love (1862), in which the “sonnets” have 16 lines;
D. G. Rossetti’s House of Life (1881); Ruben Dario’s
1322 SOTADEAN
“sonetos” and “medallones” in Azul . . . (1888), the
book that impelled Sp.-Am. ^modernismo, which had
a recurrent fascination with the sonnet in loosely or­
ganized collocations; Fernando Pessoas 35 Sonnets in
Eng. (1918); R. M. Rilke’s Sonette an Orpheus (1923);
and e. e. cummings’s several sonnet sequences in his
early volumes Tulips and Chimneys (1923), & (1925),
and XLI Poems (1925). With the 20th c. and *modern-
ism came another hiatus, followed by a renewed sense
of the sonnet sequences potential for organizing expe­
rience, esp. love, though, in the later 20th c., it was
perhaps impossible for the sonnet sequence to occur
without formal irony, cultural critique, or anachronis­
tic pathos. Thus, Nicolas Guillens political volumes are
founded on his early experiments as a sonneteer, a role
to which he returns for ironic effect (as in “El abuelo”
in West Indies, Ltd. [1934]); and John Berrymans adul­
terous Sonnets (written 1940s, pub. 1968) seek out a
self-conscious Petrarchism (esp. 15, an adaptation of
Canzoniere 189). Robert Lowell became all but ex­
clusively a sonneteer in late career: his experiments in
recasting the sonnet sequence Notebook 1967—68 as
Notebook (1970), History (1973), and For Lizzie and
Harriet (1973) might be considered the climax of his
work, culminating in The Dolphin (1973) and Day by
Day (1977). Among late-century adaptations in Eng.
are Seamus Heaneys ten “Glanmore Sonnets” (in Field
Work, 1979) and his eight-sonnet elegy “Clearances”
(in The Haw Lantern, 1987); Tony Harrison’s dissonant
rewriting of the formal trad, in Continuous: 50 Sonnets
from the School of Eloquence (1982); Marilyn Hacker’s
amatory Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons
(1986), incl. an updated crown of sonnets; and Bill
Knott’s cultural polemic in Outremer (1989).
H Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles, ed. M. F. Crow (1896);
L. C. John, The English Sonnet Sequences (1938); W.
Monch, Das Sonett: Gestalt und Geschichte (1955); Eu­
ropean Metaphysical Poetry, ed. F. J. Warnke (1961);
D. Stone, Ronsard’s Sonnet Cycles (1966); B. Stirling,
The Shakespeare Sonnet Order (1968); S. Booth, An
Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1969); T. Cave, De­
votional Poetry in France 1570-1613 (1969); essays
on Ronsard, Sceve, and du Bellay in YFS 47 (1972);
T. Cave, The Cornucopian Text (1979); J. de La Cep-
pede, From the Theorems, trans. K. Bosley (1983);
R. A. Katz, The Ordered Text (1985)—-du Bel-
lay’s sonnet sequences; J. Fineman, Shakespeare’s
Perjured Eye (1986); Hollier; T. P. Roche Jr., Pe­
trarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (1989);
G. Warkentin, “Sonnet Sequence,” The Spenser Encyclo­
pedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (1990); W. C. Johnson,
Spenser’s “Amoretti” (1990); A. R. Jones, The Currency
of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540—1620
(1990); R. Greene, Post-Petrarchism (1991); E. Hanson,
“Boredom and Whoredom: Reading Renaissance
Women’s Sonnet Sequences,” Yale Journal of Criti­
cism 10 (1997); R. Kuin, Chamber Music: Elizabethan
Sonnet Sequences and the Pleasure of Criticism (1998);
J. Holmes, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Late Victo­
rian Sonnet Sequence (2005); C. Warley, Sonnet Se­
quences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England
(2005); C. Alduy, Politique des ‘Amours” (1544—1560)
(2007), and “Lyric Economies: Manufacturing Values
in French Petrarchan Collections,” 7?Q63 (2010).
R. Greene
SOTADEAN. In cl. poetry, a type of stichic verse usu­
ally analyzed as a succession of three complete major
ionic metra (— ^) followed by a doubly shortened
(brachycatalectic) concluding one (---- ). *Resolution
and contraction are possible in any metron but the last,
as is the substitution of - or, in freer forms of
composition, certain other tetrasyllable variants. The
meter was associated with obscene or satiric verse.
Most examples are from the late Hellenistic or imperial
period, the earliest Gr. ones being by Sotades himself,
an Alexandrian poet (3d c. bce). The sotadean was in­
troduced to Lat. by Ennius, but while it can be found
in Plautus, Accius, Varro (Menippean Satires), Petro-
nius (twice), and Martial (3.29), it was never exten­
sively used in Lat. poetry.
■ F. Koch, lonicorum a maiore historia (1926); Crusius;
Halporn et al; West.
A. T. Cole
SOUND
■.Theoretical Overview
II. Articulation, Acoustics, and Cognition
III. Recent Approaches to Sound
IV. Expressivity
V. Sound Effects and Sound Patterning in Poetry
VI. Conclusion
I. Theoretical Overview. This synthetic account of
sound in poetry will recognize important devels. in
poetry, poetics, literary theory and crit., ling., acous­
tics, and cognitive science without attempting to privi­
lege one kind of knowledge over another. The topic of
sound in poetry often raises an unresolvable theoretical
controversy about the nature of poetry, namely, where
the *poem exists: concretely on the page, temporally
as a spoken verbal utterance, or liminally between the
two. If a poem simply exists on the page, then what do
its auditory qualities mean? If, as Paul Valery argued,
the poem should be approached as a musical score to
be performed aloud, what happens to the poem when
it is closed in a book and ceases to be read? The recent
profusion of poetry in electronic and recorded media,
which seems to present a new medium, a new type of
*textuality, or what Ong has called a “secondary oral-
ity,” nevertheless falls into the same two categories of
visual representation on a screen or as hypertext and as
oral performance recorded or streamed live. For present
purposes, this philosophical antinomy may be resolved
pragmatically: the poem exists in tension between the
extremes of audible speech and silent reading.
The prosodies of different langs, focus on different
qualities of sound (see prosody), and *meter typically
focuses on one phonological element of lang.—stress,
*pitch, or length (i.e., *quantity)—reducing the vary­
ing levels of such elements to a binary of more or less
prominence. Some meters incorporate a second ele­

ment in subsidiary patterns. This process, at work in
every lang, and developed over time, is not subject to
the whims of a poet since the element is intrinsic to
the lang. Attempts by poets to select a different marker
for the lang, (e.g., Eng. Ren. poets writing in *syllabic
verse or quantitative meters) are generally academic ex­
ercises, because the lang.’s phonological features will, as
Fussell has shown, overrun the intended metrical effect.
While such attempts have played a constitutive role in
the evolution of poetry and while poets consistently ex­
periment with the limits of a given lang., nevertheless,
the phonological limitations on the metrical resources
of a lang, will dictate a native speaker’s *performance of
a poem or experience of one. In short, the rhythm of
Eng. will trump syllabic length. Thus, the phonology
of a lang, not only decides the meter but also typically
locks the poet into the inherited trad.
II. Articulation, Acoustics, and Cognition
A. Articulation. The place and manner of articulation
of vowels in the mouth are often graphically repre­
sented by a trapezoid broken into nine sections, high
to low and front to back. Consonants are created by
impeding, through the use of the tongue, lips, and pal­
ate, the flow of air at different positions of articulation.
B. Acoustics. According to the science of acoustics,
sounds are waves passing through a medium. In the case
of voiced poetry, that medium is air (with the Fr. lettrist
group of the 1950s, the It. poet Arrigo Lora-Totino ex­
perimented with vocalizing poetry through water; see
sound poetry). A wave from one crest to another is a
single cycle, while the number of cycles per second is
thefrequency of a sound and is measured in Hertz (Hz).
Although the human voice ranges from 100 to 200 Hz,
the ear can perceive a range from 20 to 20,000 Hz.
Middle C is 261 Hz. The higher the frequency, the
higher the pitch. The intensity of the sound, known
as stress, is measured in decibels, i.e., amplitude or a
sound’s overall power (the height and depth of a wave’s
crests and peaks). Quantity refers to the *duration of a
sound. Meter is at stake when these phenomena are ap­
plied to syllabic lang, and patterned in accordance—or
in opposition to—its rules.
C. Cognition. Contemp. cognitive science holds that
the hemispheres of the brain process sound in different
ways or to different degrees. While the left hemisphere,
which possesses logical and analytical functions, inter­
prets ling, sounds for meaning, the right hemisphere
processes ambient sounds and music. Simultaneous
words and music, as in song, are analyzed by both
hemispheres of the brain at once. For poetry, both
hemispheres function in the apprehension and analy­
sis of ling, and aesthetic sounds. The left hemisphere
processes speech rhythm and lexical-semantic sounds,
while the right analyzes poetic sound patterning and
the aesthetics of poetry (Turner attempts to show the
relation of cognition to meter). Thus, poetry, using
both hemispheres at once, makes use of both ling,
sound and poetic sound, mapping both lexical pat­
SOUND 1323
tern and designed aesthetic patterns. In brain functions
themselves exists the dichotomy of the sensuous and
the semantic, of sound and sense.
III. Recent Approaches to Sound. The ascendancy of
deconstruction during the late 20th c. largely relegated
scholarship on sound to linguists and prosodists. De­
construction’s privileging of writing over speech left
sound as a large gap in the analysis of poetry. The differ­
ence between langs, suggests that words are determined
differentially. The difference in a single lang, between
words like bit and bat, puck and puke, lock and lick sug­
gested to Saussure that lang, was grounded through dif­
ferentials, not the presence of word features. As Saus­
sure himself observed, however, the etymological trad,
does solidify meaning in practice (see also the discus­
sion of *onomatopoeia below). Meaning depends on
both the nature of signifiers and their hist, (see sign,
signified, signifier). Change clearly occurs through
time, and the various forces of historical ling, are al­
ways at work (e.g., Grimm’s law, vowel shifts). Tran­
substantiated as textualite, speech generally becomes
a nonissue for deconstructionists and those who read
poetry as they do, whether knowingly or not. L’ecriture
(writing; see ecriture) trumps lecture (speech) every
time for Jacques Derrida; sound becomes a secondary
matter in lang., if it matters at all.
However, beyond the meanings that may or may not
be produced through the opposition of signifier and
signified, lang, can also mean obliquely through *met-
aphor. Typically, when there is not a word for some­
thing, we do not feel the need to invent one, since no
one else would know what it means. Rather, metaphor,
*simile, and analogy generate meaning where there was
none before (see Ricoeur). Metaphorical truth moves
beyond arbitrary wo rd-truth and encapsulates a role
of poetry. It concedes or ignores the truth of the ar­
bitrary signifier and moves in the opposite direction.
While meaning can be perceived as just as unstable
within metaphor as in lang., metaphor transcends the
sign (sound-image and concept), and meaning at the
edge of lang, emerges. The meaning of the tenor and
the meaning of the vehicle, when combined, produce
something that was not in the originals when they were
separate, namely, a poetic meaning (see tenor and ve­
hicle). Poetic lang, revels in words, while their repre­
sentational function is diminished. Poets give primary
importance to phonological patterning and sound
effects. When lang, is transformed into poetry, when
pattern is made through sound, and when poetic ef­
fects are produced by sound, words construct meaning
through their effects on each other and the reader. The
following W. B. Yeats line (from “The Lake Isle of Inn-
isfree”) aggregates meanings through sound juxtaposi­
tions that did not inhere individually in words like lap,
lake, low, sound, shore, hear. “I hear lake water lapping
with low sounds by the shore.” Meaning, constructed
and resilient through sound, is produced in poetry out­
side the signifier-signified dichotomy.
In La revolution du langage poetique (1974), Julia
Kristeva gives poetic lang, a sexually charged, prera-
1324 SOUND
tional, and bodily importance. Essentially, she agrees
with both Ezra Pound, i.e., that poetry is lang, charged
with meaning to the highest degree (see “How to Read,”
Literary Essays, 1968), and Jakobson, i.e., that poetic
lang, represents standard lang, charged with its infinite
possibilities—its study comprehends the becoming of
signification, i.e., meaning. She divides the semiotic
(i.e., nonverbal signifying systems) from the symbolic
but insists that both are inseparable from the signify­
ing process. Kristeva privileges the semiotic as prever­
bal, libidinal, and corporeal, in opposition to Alexander
Pope’s rational sound symbolism, as expressed in his
Essay on Criticism (1711). The semiotic, however, in­
cludes rhythm (its effect on the body) in a variation
on Mallarmean poetic mystery and power. According
to Kristeva, the communication of libidinal subjectiv­
ity is the ultimate object of poetic lang. The sounds
of words become their expressive desire and expressive
meaning. Thus, they do not echo sense in a rational way
but rather echo an individuals unconscious, chthonic
drives. Where Pope locates the importance of sound in
the mimetic imitation of the meaning of a line, Kristeva
finds that poetic sound vibrates deeply in the core of
one’s being, ultimately agreeing with Roethke and
complementing Turner’s discussion of poetic rhythm
and the brain.
It is also important to recognize the emergence of
a poetry that is concerned almost exclusively with the
sound of words and not, or at least not primarily, with
their meaning. Twentieth-c. devels. in *sound poetry and
later *Language poetry exploit the disjunction between
signifier and signified, transforming signs into mere
sounds divorced from semantic content. The *Dada
poems of Hugo Ball or Kurt Schwitters are among the
many important forerunners of this line of poetic in­
quiry. Similarly, Bernstein (1992) has questioned when
it is that noise becomes semantically meaningful. There
are all varieties of meanings composed at the subse-
mantic or sublexical units of lang, production (i.e.,
onomatopoeia, grunts, groans, nonlexical voicings of
dissent and agreement, etc.). Where Bernstein disap­
pointingly finds meaning self-embodied by the whole
poem, he does provide a starting point for the discus­
sion of nonlexical elements, though not always sound
based, within a poem. Such questions find a predeces­
sor in early 20th-c. avant-garde music and the futurist
noise-art of Luigi Russolo (see futurism).
Slam poetry, on the other hand, is to a far greater de­
gree concerned with semantic meaning, often a poem’s
political or moral message (see poetry slam). Such
poetry, frequently memorized, is located almost exclu­
sively as an oral phenomenon and later disseminated in
textual transcription or recorded performance. Emerg­
ing from the convergence of a textual avant-garde, pop­
ular music, and the poetry reading, slam poetry created
its own oral trad, with its clearest analogues in the
1950s *Beat poets. Its sonic qualities are most typically
*alliteration, *assonance, *anaphora, and paromoiosis;
thus, its difference from traditional poetry lies mostly
in locale.
IV. Expressivity. One debate about sound and poetry,
dating to Plato’s Cratylus, concerns the inherent mean­
ing in sound; i.e., does sound express meaning? The
answer is no, but with numerous qualifications that
have fascinated poets. Meaning can clearly be evoked
or connoted by sounds as in onomatopoeia (see also
the concept of the ideophone in Tedlock), but this
kind of meaning in large part corresponds to a histori­
cal train of significance. If words are signifying abstrac­
tions, onomatopoetic effects seem to express a gener­
alized meaning based on natural phenomena such as
animal sounds or water. Ultimately, however, when
we examine the written words that langs, have for the
sounds animals make, the *trope descends almost to
the arbitrariness of most words, e.g., the Eng. woof
and the Fr. ouah ouah for the sounds of a dog; likewise,
the Gr. barbaros for barbarians was derived from the
sounds the Greeks ascribed to other langs. While such
words stem etymologically from sound imitation, their
meanings are virtually as arbitrary as those of any other
signifier, given their subsequent devel.
*Iconicity, the concept that there is an analogy or
resemblance between a word and the object to which it
refers, was propagated by C. S. Peirce. Mimetic sound
effects accordingly become central to the representa­
tional system of lang. Subsequent research in the 20th
c. demonstrated its existence in all langs, and at every
level of ling, structure. For Peirce, the icon, one of three
types of Representation, is a sign that resembles its ob­
ject, however inexactly (pop, hiss, murmur—the names
of sounds tend to be onomatopoetic). The *phonest-
heme (a term coined by J. R. Firth) is a phoneme that
has a recognizable semantic association because it ap­
pears in numerous words with similar meanings and
sounds. Such words seem to have a familiar, natural
force on a reader and seem mimetically expressive. In
“Vowel and Consonant Patterns in Poetry,” Masson has
observed this phenomenon in the different connota­
tions of the word for night across langs. Wellek and
Warren use the term orchestration for such morphemic
echoing in poetry. Perhaps more useful to poetry is
kinesthetics, which associates the sound produced or
being produced with a semantic meaning (i.e., tradi­
tional sound symbolism). Richards (1929) and Ran­
som (1936) demonstrated, through a dummy version
of stanza 15 of John Milton’s “On the Morning of
Christ’s Nativity” and a *parody of Alfred, Lord Ten­
nyson’s “Come Down, O Maid,” respectively, that the
same sounds and the same rhythm, when divorced
from original meaning, lose their expressivity. (For an
approach to sound expressiveness via pragmatic theory
and relevance theory, see Pilkington.)
V. Sound Effects and Sound Patterning in Po­
etry. However arbitrary sound expressivity may be,
readers may often experience an echo of sense in the
sound of lines like Homer’s “para thina poluphloisboio
thalasses” (Iliad 1.34) and Matthew Arnold’s “roar /
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, . . . /
Begin, and cease, and then again begin” (“Dover

Beach,” 9-10,12), both purporting to imitate the actual
sound of waves. Likewise, Milton’s fricatives also accen­
tuate meaning, as in “Out of my sight, thou Serpent,
that name best I Befits thee with him leagu’d, thyself
as false I And hateful” (Paradise Lost, 10.867-69). Any
attempt to ascribe meaning to sound, however, should
heed the warning proferred by Ransom’s parody. Ten­
nyson’s “The moan of doves in immemorial elms, / The
murmuring of innumerable bees” (30—31) becomes
“The murdering of innumerable beeves,” which dem­
onstrates that, while sound may well echo sense, the
same sounds in different words do not generate the
same meanings. Sound as mimetic representation,
thus, clearly entails a reader’s recognition of the mean­
ing of a line before the meaning of a sound pattern.
There are certain associations made with particu­
lar sounds, though there are invariably exceptions.
High vowels tend toward brightness, highness, vivac­
ity, sharpness (see cognitive poetics). P. B. Shelley’s
“To a Skylark” begins on a shrieking fever pitch of
the four highest vowels, “Hail to thee, blithe spirit,”
setting the tone for the poem. In John Keats’s “Ode
to a Nightingale,” the poet addresses the nightingale
in appropriately high vowels in response to the bird’s
high-pitched song: “light-winged Dryad of the trees.”
By contrast, low vowels tend to convey wholeness,
roundness, downness, heaviness, or darkness. Milton’s
“On the Late Massacre in Piedmont,” e.g., is full of
low vowels. In the final lines of the *sonnet, Milton’s
curse on the It. fields is set low, and the last line pres­
ents a steady descent “that from these may grow / A
hundredfold, who having learnt thy way / Early may
fly the Babylonian woe.” Keats’s ode similarly begins
with low vowels of tubercular sleep before it ascends
with the prospect of the nightingale—“drowsy numb­
ness,” the hemlock “drunk,” the “dull opiate,” and the
speaker Lethe-ward “sunk.” The final line of the first
stanza alternates high and mid vowels, without low
ones, before a striking ascent in the line’s last syllable,
“Singest of summer in full-throated ease.” These asso­
ciations are not, strictly speaking, meanings of sounds
or abstractions but rather connotations that poets have
traditionally embraced.
Consonants, too, have their feelings. Liquids, na­
sals, fricatives, and plosives produce their own peculiar
sound effects and are often combined with alliteration.
Yeats’s famous lapping lake water illustrates sufficiently.
The liquid consonants, / and r and sometimes w, are
soft and melodic, giving the impression of water and
smoothness, as in the famous Yeats line, or, in Keats’s
Endymion, “Wild thyme, and valley-lilies whiter still I
Than Leda’s love, and cresses from the rill” (1.157-58),
which conveys languor and softness.
Nasals m, n, and ng (as in sing) divert the flow of
air into the nasal passage. Tennyson’s murmuring bees
imitate the insects with the string of nasals. Fricatives
include f, th (both in thin and then), s, sh, h, v, z, and
the sound in the middle of the word “measure.” Milton
consistently plays on fricatives; in Paradise Lost, book
10, Satan addresses the fallen angels as they turn into
SOUND 1325
serpents: “On all sides, from innumerable tongues I A
dismal universal hiss, the sound / Of public scorn [.] ...
punisht in the shape he sinn’d, / According to his
doom: he would have spoke, / But hiss for hiss return’d
... to Serpents all as accessories” (507-9, 516-18, 520).
The affricates ch, and j (as in “yudge”) begin as plo­
sives or stops and then, like the fricatives, rasp through
a friction upon airflow. J is voiced, which means the
vocal cords vibrate in its pronunciation. Philomel, her
tongue cut out, throatily cries “jug, jug.”
Plosives or stops—b, d, g, p, t, k—are the harshest
consonants and are probably those the most often used
to emphasize sense through sound. Yeats’s “King Billy
bomb balls” (“Lapis Lazuli”) explodes in the speaker’s
mouth, while Pope twice uses plosives to imply con­
stipation: in the Essay on Criticism, poets “Ev’n to the
Dregs and Squeezings of the Brain’, I Strain out the last,
dull droppings of their Sense, I And Rhyme with all the
Rage of Impotence” (607—9); and in the “Epistle to Dr.
Arbuthnot” regarding Ambrose Philips, who “Just writes
to make his barrenness appear, I And strains from hard­
bound brains eight lines a year” (181-82).
In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Ani­
mal (1872), Charles Darwin used photographs to ex­
amine the facial expressions that occur with particular
sounds. While Darwin did not concern himself so
much with the actual sounds, Nims uses the pho­
tographs to analyze consonant clusters. Darwin re­
produced a photograph by Oscar Gustave Rejlander
of a woman sneering and exposing part of a canine
tooth. Nims observes that most words beginning
with the consonant cluster sn are as unpleasant as the
expression of the woman in the photograph—sneer
itself, snitch, snob, snaggle, snort, and snarl. The short
u can be ugsome as in ugh and upchuck, slut, sludge,
and pus, and in a photograph of Rejlander himself
hamming an expression as he says the word disgusted.
Such sounds can, as Nims says, physicalize a poem’s
meaning.
The use by poets of vowels and consonants to un­
derline meaning in the line is often conjoined with
alliteration or other nonfixed sound patterns to em­
phasize and underline the designed effect. These ex­
amples illustrate that, despite the popping of plosives,
the mellifluousness of liquids, or the sliding of glides
(semivowels w, y, and sometimes j), there is no inher­
ent meaning within the sounds. The issue of sound
expressivity or mimetic sound, while not a tenable
theoretical position, provides an enactment of mean­
ing or a gesture toward it. Poets dramatically associate
sounds with the meaning of a word or line for empha­
sis or effect.
The archetypical demonstration of auditory pyro­
technics in Pope’s Essay on Criticism delivers, as does the
poem in its entirety, both the argument and evidence
for the claim that “The Sound must seem an Echo to
the Sense” (365). A soft wind must be demonstrated
by a soft line, as Pope both says and shows through the
repetition of the letter s (366-67). The loud, hoarse
lines (368-69) likewise enact his own dictum as it
1326 SOUND
roars. However, Pope alliterates with the same s sound,
though the line is tempered by consonant clusters and
heavy with monosyllables. Pope also envelops the two
harsh, roaring *couplets (368-71) between the two soft
couplets (366-67 and 372-73). The final two couplets
of the passage (370-73), while spectacular for mostly
metrical reasons, deserve analysis as well:
When Ajax strives, some Rock’s vast Weight to
throw,
The Line too labors, and the Words move slow.
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the Plain,
Flies o’er th’unbending Corn, and skims along the
Main.
Ajax’s slow, heavy lines are both loaded with mono­
syllables and consonants (even the typically melliflu­
ous liquids are overpowered as they shudder and heave
into the middle of the third foot). The first line of the
Camilla couplet again repeats the alliterating s sounds,
before moving into the fastest line in the Eng. lang.
Line 373 sports more words beginning with vowels
than the sole two in the previous Ajax couplet. The
*elision and light vowels give the impression of speed.
Lines 356-57 before this passage had castigated poets
for using needless *alexandrines that are “languishingly
slow,” but Pope the metrical genius makes his speedy
line 373 itself an alexandrine.
Sound pattern, like alliteration, assonance, paro-
moiosis (the *parallelism between the sounds of words
in adjacent clauses or lines), *consonance, and ono­
matopoeia, can function to tag words of special impor­
tance. Sound patterning can then be used to underline
the semantic import or key words of a line. Sound
schemes are sometimes used to produce a demonstra­
ble pattern on a higher level of design than simple rep­
etition. Masson (“Vowel and Consonant Patterning”)
observed sequence (abcabc) and *chiasmus (abccbd)
at work in sound patterning and found them to be in
consistent usage. *Envelope {abba) and simpler alter­
nation (abab) of sound can also have broad application,
although analysis of such patterns and their complica­
tions deserves further study. Consider, e.g., the Yeats
line referenced throughout: “lake water lapping with
low.” The 7s and ws alternate ababa at the beginning of
each word. Such sound patterns can be used alongside
rhythm to coincide or *counterpoint, just as, in Latin
prosody, it has been suggested that stress was often pat­
terned to coincide with long syllables in the fixed final
feet of dactylic *hexameter.
All such sound-patterning shapes order and intensi­
fies meaning and is, thus, essential to the analysis of a
poem. *Rhyme is perhaps the most familiar sound pat­
terning in poetry. According to Levy and others (Wim-
satt, Hollander), rhyme, which binds two words that
would normally not be connected in a prose sentence,
produces secondary semantic effects, incl. ironical con­
trasts with humorous potential. Lord Byron is a master
of this technique (“even when he prayed I He turned
from grisly saints, and martyrs hairy, / To the sweet
portraits of the Virgin Mary” [Don Juan, 2. 149.
6-8]), having learned it from Pope (“But thousands die
without or this or that, I Die, and endow a College, or
a Cat” [“Epistle to Bathurst,” 97-98]). Or as Hopkins
said, condensing this matter, “There are two elements
in the beauty rhyme has to the mind, the likeness or
sameness of sound and the unlikeness or difference of
meaning.”
VI. Conclusion. Sound, the foundation of lang., ul­
timately comprises the form and craft of poetry, sub­
suming meter; the schemes of alliteration, assonance,
and rhyme; and the segmental phonemes of vowels
and consonants. Such elements of sound have been
analyzed with varying degrees of comprehensiveness.
(See the only extensive bibl. in Brogan 1981.) There is
no appropriate term for sound patterning as there is
for *rhythm. Thus, prosody is frequently used to incor­
porate both metrical and segmental sound patterning.
Some have argued that there is a norm or experi­
ential core behind the varying realizations of a single
poem. Correct *scansion and recognition of rhyme de­
pend on historical context. The study of recorded read­
ings seems generally to assume this position by tracking
the variety and range of differences. This approach
ultimately proves, however, that there is no definitive
performance of a poem. While there are a certain num­
ber of sounds that a speaker must get right to give a
correct reading—the core or norm of the reading of a
given poem—there are numerous ling, and nonpho-
nemic differences that can vary from reader to reader
while still constituting a perfectly acceptable reading of
the poem, as one can discern clearly in the strange-to-
modern-ears recordings by Yeats and what can be heard
of Tennyson’s. This wavering style of recitation, now
out of favor, was “author-approved.” An analysis of re­
corded readings should not, of course, be in any way
seen as a foray into the realm of authorial *voice or the
intentional fallacy, in that the rightness of a sound is
a matter of (1) historical devel. (2) an understanding of
poetics, and (3) a recognition of design in a poem that
is demonstrably patterned. Effects on a reader might
vary, but the fact remains that designed effects occur.
Jakobson believes that every verbal element in a line
of verse is transformed into an element of poetry or
poetic speech. Though Jakobson’s argument cannot be
falsified, it is noteworthy in that it reminds a reader
that both levels of lang., sound and meaning, intersect
at all times in any poem and necessitate a synthetic
analysis, treating neither in isolation from the other.
At the same time, a systematic analysis of every ele­
ment of sound, meaning, and their nexus at work is
daunting. The interplay of sounds between themselves
and on meaning fully expresses and accomplishes the
craft of verse, as in T. S. Eliot’s concept of the auditory
imagination. Poetic lang, constitutes the poem and is
creative action.
According to Wallace Stevens, the sound of words is
their importance in poetry; sound is the principal busi­
ness of poetry. The poet harnesses reality and makes a
reader’s or listener’s first response an aesthetic one. As

Stevens says, “A poet’s words are of things that do not
exist without the words.” We attempt through words
to express the truth of our existence, our thoughts, and
feelings. And we respond to these words not only with
analysis but with our physical senses, as in the case of
William Blake’s mellifluous phrasing in “To the Eve­
ning Star,” “to wash the dusk with silver.”
■ E de Saussure, Cours de linguistique generale (1916);
I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism (1929); J. C. Ransom,
The World's Body (1938); D. I. Masson, “Patterns of
Vowel and Consonant in a Rilkean Sonnet,” MLR 46
(1951); W. Stevens, “The Noble Rider and the Sound
of Words,” The Necessary Angel (1951); D. I. Masson,
“Vowel and Consonant Patterns in Poetry,” JAAC 12
(1953); “Word and Sound in Yeats’s ‘Byzantium,’ ” ELH
20 (1953); and “Free Phonetic Patterns in Shakespeare’s
Sonnets,” Neophilologus 38 (1954); W. K. Wimsatt,
“One Relation of Rhyme to Reason,” The Verbal Icon
(1954); J. Hollander, “The Music of Poetry,” JAAC 15
(1956); Wellek and Warren; P. Valery, “Poesie et pen-
see abstraite,” Oeuvres, ed. J. Hytier, v. 1 (1957); The
Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. H.
House and G. Storey (1959); D. H. Hymes, “Pho­
nological Aspects of Style,” Sebeok; D. I. Masson,
“Thematic Analysis of Sound in Poetry,” Proceedings
of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society-Literary
and Historical Section 9 (1960); C. S. Peirce, “The Icon,
Index, and Symbol,” Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce, v.
2, Elements of Logic, ed. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss
(1960); J. Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky (1961);
D. I. Masson, “Sound Repetition Terms,” Poetics—Po-
etyka—Poetika, ed. D. Davie et al. (1961); J. R. Firth,
The Tongues of Men and Speech (1964); T. Roethke,
“Some Remarks on Rhythm,” On the Poet and His
Craft (1965); A. A. Hill, “A Phonological Description
of Poetic Ornaments,” L&S 2 (1969); D. I. Masson,
“The Keatsian Incantation,” John Keats, ed. K. Muir
(1969); J. Levy, “The Meanings of Form and the Forms
of Meaning,” Paralipomena (1971); J. C. Ransom, “Pos­
itive and Near-Positive Aesthetics,” Beating the Bushes
(1972); T. S. Eliot, “Milton I,” Selected Prose, ed.
F. Kermode (1975); A. A. Hill, “Analogies, Icons, and
Images,” and “Two Views of Poetic Language and
Meaning,” Constituent and Pattern in Poetry (1976);
D. I. Masson, “Poetic Sound-Patterning Reconsid­
ered,” Proceedings ofthe Leeds Philosophical and Literary
Society-Literary and Historical Section 16 (1976)—Mas­
son’s sonal summa and survey of eight national lits.;
W. K. Wimsatt, “In Search of Verbal Mimesis,” The
Day of the Leopards (1976); J. M. Lotman, The Struc­
ture of the Artistic Text, trans. G. LenhofF and R.
Vroon (1977); P. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor,
trans. R. Czerny (1977); P. Fussell, Poetic Meter and
Poetic Form, rev. ed. (1979); B. Hrushovski, “The
Meaning of Sound Patterns in Poetry,” PoT 2 (1980);
Brogan; W. J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982);
R. Chapman, The Treatment ofSounds in Language and
Literature (1984); Hollander, “The Poem in the Ear”;
E Turner, “The Neural Lyre,” Natural Classicism (1985);
G. Stewart, Reading Voices (1990); C. Bernstein, “Arti­
SOUND POETRY 1327
fice of Absorption,” A Poetics (1992); J. F. Nims, West­
ern Wind, rev. ed. (1992); R. Tsur, What Makes Sound
Patterns Expressive? (1992); H. Gross and R. McDow­
ell, Sound and Form in Modern Poetry, rev. ed. (1996);
Close Listening, ed. C. Bernstein (1998); R. Tsur, Poetic
Rhythm (1998); A. Pilkington, Poetic Effects (2000); D.
Tedlock, “Ideophone,” Key Terms in Language and Cul­
ture, ed. A. Duranti (2001); N. Fabb, Language and Lit­
erary Structure (2002); A. Hecht, “The Music of Forms,”
Melodies Unheard (2003); C. Noland, “Phonic Mat­
ters,” PMLA 120 (2005); L. Wheeler, Voicing American
Poetry (2008); The Sound ofPoetry I The Poetry ofSound,
ed. M. Perloff and C. Dworkin (2009); “Wallace Ste­
vens and ‘The Less Legible Meanings of Sound,’ ” The
Wallace Stevens Journal 33.1 (2009)—spec, iss; R. Tsur,
“The Poetic Function and Aesthetic Qualities: Cogni­
tive Poetics and the Jakobsonian Model,” Acta Linguis-
tica Hafniensia 42.1 (2010)—spec. iss.
D. Wood
SOUND POETRY. If poetry is the verbal art in which
*sound and sense are arranged in ideal tension, sound
poetry (also “sonorist rhythms,” “phonetic poetry,” or
poesie sonore) alters this relationship by multiplying,
reducing, or denying semantic reference, while ampli­
fying the phonetic and aural properties of lang. Some
sound poems attempt to generate natural signifying
relationships between sound and meaning through
phonetic symbolism; others use sound as antagonistic
or indifferent toward meaning. Sound poems challenge
the limits of natural langs, and produce the illusion
of lang, before, beyond, or after meaning, from the
Adamic to the utopian.
Surveys of sound poetry often furnish it with a long
genealogy encompassing all ancient and mod. uses of
preverbal speech codes such as *onomatopoeia, *glos-
solalia, the *incantations of *oral poetry, *nonsense
verse like Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” and Stephane
Mallarme’s formulation of inanite sonore. While these
codes are among sound poetry’s principal resources and
precedents, the practice of sound poetry has fairly dis­
tinct origins in an extensive, international network of
avant-garde poets from the late 19th c. into the 1930s,
and it has been extended and theorized by neo-avant-
garde poets from the 1940s to the present (see avant-
garde poetics).
In Europe, nearly all the historical avant-garde
movements practiced a version of sound poetry. In the
pamphlet Declaration of the Word as Such (1913), the
Rus. futurist Aleksei Kruchenykh coined the neolo­
gism *zaum (transratio nal or beyonsense) to describe
poems he had written “in their own language,” of
which the most notorious example is “Dyr bul schyl,”
though Velimir Khlebnikov’s 1910 “Zaklyatie smek-
hom” (“Incantation by Laughter”) also anticipated this
tendency. While Kruchenykh’s poems deploy nonce
words or write through source texts via lipogrammatic
removals of all consonants (see lipogram) in the at­
tempt to “destroy language” and install referential
indeterminacy, more ambitious zaum’ poems, such as
1328 SOUND POETRY
Khlebnikov’s “Zangezi,” dramatize a universal lang,
of the future that fixes references at varying planes of
psychic evolution, purporting to vocalize the speech
of gods, birds, and other nonhuman phenomena. The
Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor (1931), the
voyage of a poet-parachutist ejecting himself from
the lang, system into what Octavio Paz calls a “post-
Babelic” fantasy of ling, reunification, bears compari­
son (see creationism).
Experiments contemporaneous to zaum’ in Italy in­
clude Aldo Palazzeschi s examples of a poetica del diver­
timento, playful poems in which infantile stutters and
syllabic refrains are a refuge for the crepuscular poet
discarded by the culture of modernity. Although he
was briefly associated with It. *futurism, Palazzeschi’s
ludic sound has little in common with F. T. Marinetti’s
parole in liberta (words in freedom), a poetry that at­
tempts to enact a synthetic *mimesis of the city or
mod. warfare, most often through martial onomato­
poeias such as Zang Tumb Tuum (1912). Guillaume
Apollinaire voiced a familiar objection in his remark
that this scientific notation of machine noise could be
faulted as “gags” or trompe-oreilles.
In the germanophone context, *Dada sound po­
etry built on examples of nonsense poetry like that of
Christian Morgenstern. Most often cited among the
many varieties of sound poetry produced by the Da-
daists, Hugo Ball’s “gadji beri bimba,” a cycle of five
lautgedichte (noise poems) or verse ohne worte (word­
less verses), posited a primitive refounding of the word
in reaction to the commodification of lang. Performed
at the Zurich Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, these poems
offer a prophetic authority for sound poetry based on a
magical “innermost alchemy” of antiquated words and
a liturgical performance register, while also suggesting
the babbling repetitions of a traumatized soldier. Other
Dada sound poetry, such as Kurt Schwitters’s lengthy
Ursonata, established musical protocols and structuring
devices for sound poetry, and Raoul Housmann’s “op-
tophonetic poetry” pioneered typographical notation
systems for performance volume, tempo, and duration.
Tristan Tzara and Richard Hiilsenbeck employed the
ethnographic imitation ofAf. sounds, which North has
identified as a ling, form of racial masquerade. Dada
had a poorly documented but marked impact on the
vanguard poets of the Sp. Caribbean, such as Luis Pales
Matos, yet the misappropriation of pseudo-African
vocables by Dada chantes negres must be sharply dis­
tinguished from the sound motifs characteristic of ne-
grismo poetry of the late 1920s and 1930s such as that of
Nicolas Guillen, who is also identified with the use of
the *jitanjafora inaugurated by the Cuban poet Mari­
ano Bruit’s “Leyenda” (1928).
Despite the increasingly self-aware, international
proliferation of sound poetry as a genre—esp. from
1910 to 1930—no poetry advertised itself as such in the
Anglo-Am. trad, at that time. Sound play in the work
of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein was instrumental
to the late modernist notion of “the revolution of the
word,” and even Louis Armstrong’s scat has been pro­
posed as a cousin to sound poetry. However, the emer­
gent orthodoxies of New Critical *formalism (see new
criticism) make T. S. Eliot’s 1942 remark a mainstay
of the anglophone view well into the postwar period:
“We can be deeply stirred by hearing the recitation of a
poem in a language of which we understand no word;
but if we are then told that the poem is gibberish and
has no meaning, we shall consider that we have been
deluded—this was no poem, it was merely an imitation
of instrumental music.” As if anticipating and flount-
ing such objections, Dada bruitisme and Rus. zaum’
persistendy employ *xenoglossia as a device. Indeed,
the deliberate use of incomprehensible foreign langs, is
a primary asemantic speech code in which sound po­
etry traffics, often in open response to the diasporic dis­
placements of global cultures. Performed in the langs,
of three warring nations at once, Tzara’s 1916 “Simul-
taneist” poem “L’amiral cherche une maison a louer”
(The Admiral Searches for a House to Rent) dilates this
technique.
While even its staunchest proponents, such as Jolas,
considered sound poetry to be a limited ling, strategy
in the wake of World War II, the genre has a rich post­
war life in Fr. *lettrisme, esp. in the work of Isidore
Isou (1925-2007) and Henri Chopin (1922-2008),
as well as in that of Bob Cobbing (1920—2002) in
England, Ernst Jandl (1925-2000) in Austria, Jack-
son Mac Low (1922-2004) in the U.S., and later
bpNichol (1944-88) and Steve McCaffery (b. 1947)
in Canada. McCaffery, alongside Chopin and Fluxus
artist Dick Higgins (1938-98), have been instrumen­
tal to the validation of sound poetry as a historical
genre and performance practice. The U.S. Language
poets emergent in the 1970s bear out that influence,
as in Bernstein’s remark in “Artifice of Absorption” that
“there is no fixed I threshold at which noise becomes
phonically I significant; the further back this threshold
is / pushed, the greater the resonance at the cutting I
edge” (see language poetry). With some exceptions,
Chopin’s distinction holds that sound poetry before
World War II is phonetic poetry, preserving an at­
tachment to words and syllables as compositional
units, while, after the war, lettrisme arbitrarily assigns
phonic values to letters, moving sound poetry toward
performance scores for “sub-phonemic” levels of noise.
Postwar practitioners have placed greater emphasis on
nontextual performance and recording media, often
disseminating poems by tape recorder as in the works
of Francois Dufrene and stressing ambitious research
programs over ludic play. Still, much *concrete poetry
includes an active sound component, and the long *vi-
sual poetry trad, runs in tandem with that of sound
poetry, as typographical innovations often enhance or
dictate performance standards (see typography).
*Voice has become a major theoretical issue for
sound poetry. Antonin Artaud’s scream poems and
Michael McClure’s “beast language” offer an affiliation
to sound poetry that reconnects the voice to biologi­
cal priorities, while McCaffery has rethought the voice
as a “paleotechnic” instrument in a wider media ecol­
ogy. A third critical view, exemplified by the philoso­
pher Giorgio Agamben, holds that written, asemantic

speech codes are the textual figuration of embodied
voice, opening poetry to an “unheard dimension sus­
tained in the pure breath of the voice, in mere vox as
insignificant will to signify.” A countertendency could
be located in a group of sound collagists and aleators
working in the trad, of John Cage, for whom the ap­
proximation of lang, to noise often eschews the voice
as a unifying performance principle in favor of ran­
dom and found materials (see aleatory poetics and
constraint).
Sound poetry has a complex but coherent status
in the hist, of poetic forms, but it should be stressed
that sound poetry also belongs to a hist, of dissonance
and noise in 20th-c. cinema, music, phonographic
reproduction, and radio, and emerges not by coinci­
dence in a transformative historical period for auditory
technologies. The generation of sound poets now reach­
ing maturity, such as the Canadian poet Christian Bok
(b. 1966), has suggested that the “theurgical,” anti tech­
nological reaction of early sound poets such as Hugo
Ball is untenable for contemp. poets who may be the
first “who can reasonably expect in our lifetime to
write poems for a machinic audience.” Bok’s work in
progress The Cyborg Opera, refigures the sound poetry
inheritance for an “undreamt poetics of electronica”
or a “spoken techno” that he allies with the technical
virtuosity of beatboxers such as Razael. Bok reimag­
ines sound poems as participants in a “growing digital
culture,” as in his lettristic drum kit notation systems
(“Bhm—T-Nsh—tpt’Bhm—T—Nsh [thsss]”), and he also
systematically plumbs vernacular phonetic patterns:
“my tongue muttering I an unsung lettering.”
I A. Reyes, “Las jitanjaforas,” in La experiencia liter­
aria (1942); I. Isou, Introduction a une Nouvelle Poesie
et une Nouvelle Musique (1947); E. Jolas, “From the
Jabberwocky to Lettrisme,” Transition 1 (1948); G.
Apollinaire, “The New Spirit and the Poets,” Selected
Writings, trans. R. Shattuck (1950); T. S. Eliot, “The
Music of Poetry,” Selected Prose, ed. E Kermode (1975);
H. Chopin, Poesie Sonore Internationale (1979); Sound
Poetry, ed. S. McCaffery and bpNichol (1979); J.
Schnapp, “Politics and Poetics in E T. Marinetti’s Zang
Tumb Tuuum? Stanford Italian Review 5.1 (1985); O.
Paz, Convergences, trans. H. Lane (1987); C. Bernstein,
“Artifice of Absorption,” A Poetics (1992); G. Janecek,
Zaum (1996); M. North, The Dialect of Modernism
(1997); G. Agamben, “Pascoli and the Thought of the
Voice,” The End of the Poem, trans. D. Heller-Roazen
(1999); D. Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History ofSound
in the Arts (1999); S. McCaffery, Prior to Meaning
(2001); T. J. Demos, “Circulations: In and Around Zu­
rich Dada,” October 105 (2003); C. Dworkin, “To De­
stroy Language,” Textual Practice 18 (2004); The Sound
of Poetry I The Poetry of Sound, ed. M. Perloff and C.
Dworkin (2009).
■ Discography/Web Resources: Text Sound Compo­
sitions, RELP 1049, 1054, 1072-74, 1102-03 (1968-
70)—seven records of the Stockholm festivals of sound
poetry (partly available on UbuWeb); Futura: Poesia
Sonora, ed. A. Lora-Totino, Cramps 5206-301-307
(1978)—six-record international anthol., available on
SOUTH AFRICA, POETRY OF 1329
UbuWeb, http://www.ubu.com (best audio resource on
sound poetry).
■ Periodicals: Ou, ed. H. Chopin (1963—68); Stereo
Headphones, ed. N. Zurbrugg (1969-)—most issues
include records.
H. Feinsod
SOUTH AFRICA, POETRY OF
I. Afrikaans
II. English
I. Afrikaans. The first examples of poetry in Afrikaans
date from the late 19th c. and formed part of efforts to
raise the political consciousness of Afrikaner people by
elevating the status of the spoken lang. Afrikaans—de­
rived from the 17th-c. Dutch spoken by the first colo­
nizers of the Cape of Good Hope and influenced by
Malay, Creole-Port., Ger., Fr., southern Nguni langs.,
and Eng.—to the status of a written lang, with its own
lit. Because of the racially divided nature of South Af.
society, this process partly excluded Afrikaans speakers
of mixed racial descent who played a significant role
in the devel. of the lang. The primary aims of the early
Afrikaans poets were to inspire readers to fight for the
official recognition of their lang., to educate, and to en­
tertain. To do this, they focused on the lives of ordinary
burghers, their folklore, South Africa as fatherland, re­
ligion, and topical events, also using humor in poems
that contained elements of the surreal or absurd. The
style was mostly rhetorical rather than original, naive
rather than sophisticated.
After the Anglo-Boer War (1899—1902), attempts to
standardize Afrikaans and produce a body of lit. in that
lang, gathered renewed impetus; Afrikaans gained of­
ficial status only in 1925. This process gained credibility
through the greater sophistication and literary sensibil­
ity displayed by poets of the “first generation”: Jan F. E.
Celliers (1865-1940), Totius (pseud, of J. D. du Toit,
1877-1953), and C. Louis Leipoldt (1880-1947). Their
early volumes show the effects of the war, but their
work included other subjects (the landscape, religion,
historical themes, political matters), as well as a variety
of poetic techniques and styles, inch *free verse and the
dramatic *monologue.
The following generation added new elements to the
repertoire of Afrikaans poetry, such as greater individu­
alism, eroticism, and cl. allusions; but it did not make
the same impact as its predecessors. Toon van den
Heever (1894-1956) can be regarded as the most im­
portant of the new poets, while older poets like Eugene
Marais (1871-1936) and A. G. Visser (1878-1929) also
published distinctive work in the 1920s. Marais ex­
plored new terrain in the volume Dwaalstories en ander
vertellings (Rain Bull and Other Tales from the San,
1927), a small collection of stories and poems based on
the oral trad, of the San tribe.
The early 1930s brought an important renewal in
Afrikaans poetry with the emergence of a group of
poets (N. P. van Wyk Louw [1906-70], W.E.G. Louw
[1913-80], Uys Krige [1910-87], Elisabeth Eybers
[1915—2007]) who consciously reflected on their voca­
1330 SOUTH AFRICA, POETRY OF
tion as artists. They argued for a lit. that would adhere
to the highest possible aesthetic and artistic standards,
taking the best in Dutch, Ger., Eng., Fr., and Sp. lit.
as their benchmark. Their poetry was known for its
confessional nature and explorations of inner life but
also turned to topics such as hist., religion, philosophy,
and politics. All these poets built important oeuvres in
the subsequent decades; van Wyk Louw achieved the
highest status with works such as the epic poem Raka
(1942) and the volume Tristia (1962). Eybers dealt with
female experience in poems of great sobriety and tech­
nical refinement in an oeuvre that spanned nearly 60
years.
The poets who made their debut in the late 1940s
(D. J. Opperman [1914-85], Ernst van Heerden [1916—
97], S. V. Petersen [1914-87], Olga Kirsch [1924-97],
G. A. Watermeyer [1917-72]) reflected the reality of a
modernizing, urban, postwar world in the themes, im­
agery, and formal attributes of their work. The most
important poet of this generation was Opperman,
whose poetry distinguished itself through its concrete
imagery, symbolic layering, and verbal economy as
well as its portrayal of racial tension in South Af. so­
ciety. High points are the epic poem Joernaal van Jorik
(Jorik’s Journal, 1949) and the volume Blom en baaierd
(Flower and Chaos, 1956).
The 1960s brought revolutionary change to Afri­
kaans lit., signaling the beginning of a strong antihe-
gemonic strain in Afrikaans. This was preceded by the
work of certain poets in the late 1950s. The immigrant
Peter Blum (1925-90) published only two volumes be­
fore leaving South Africa in the early 1960s but remains
acclaimed for the sophisticated, satirical, and challeng­
ing nature of his work. Ingrid Jonker’s (1933-65) po­
etry is known for its surreal imagery and spontaneous
musicality. She became an iconic figure after her early
suicide and is esp. remembered for her poem “Die
kind” (The Child) about the shooting of a child during
political unrest in I960. In this period, political verse
was also written by Barend Toerien (1921-2009) and
Adam Small (b. 1936), who used the Cape vernacu­
lar in his volume Kitaar my kruis (Guitar My Cross,
1961). The most radical departure from the existing
trad, came with the work of Breyten Breytenbach
(b. 1939), who made his debut in 1964. Under the in­
fluence of the Fr. surrealists and the Dutch experimen­
tal poets of the 1950s (see surrealism; low countries,
poetry of the), Breytenbach wrote powerfully origi­
nal free verse that transgressed boundaries through its
use of every available register of lang, and the inclusion
of starding imagery, explicit erotic content, and politi­
cal commentary. Breytenbach’s poetry also introduced
Zen Buddhism to the largely Protestant Afrikaans trad.
The 1970s saw the emergence of several strong
women poets. The most important of these were
Sheila Cussons (1922-2004), who brought Catholic
mysticism to Afrikaans poetry; Wilma Stockenstrom
(b. 1933), who probed human insignificance within
the vast theater of the Af. landscape; and Antjie Krog
(b. 1952), who explored the compromised position of
the creative woman in a patriarchal and racist society.
Although there were a number of new poets in the
1970s and 1980s who addressed existential issues in the
traditional mode (Lina Spies [b. 1939], I. L. de Villiers
[1936-2009], Petra Muller [b. 1935], T. T. Cloete
[b. 1924]), this period also brought the introduction
of poetry that openly explored gay sexuality (Lucas
Malan [1946-2010], Johann de Lange [b. 1959], Joan
Hambidge [b. 1956]), as well as “struggle poetry,” writ­
ten by mixed-race poets (Peter Snyders [b. 1939], Clin­
ton V. du Plessis [b. 1963], Patrick Petersen [1951-97],
Marius Titus [b. 1946]) in protest against the apartheid
regime.
After the first democratic election in South Af­
rica in 1994, new themes emerged under the pres­
sure of the changing political and social landscape.
Apart from exploring existing themes, poets focused
on identity issues (Krog, Ronelda Kamfer [b. 1981]),
ownership of the land (Krog, Bernard Odendaal [b.
1955]), ecological questions (Johann Lodewyk Marais
[b. 1956], Martjie Bosman [b. 1954]), the position of
Afrikaans in a multilingual society (Breytenbach, Diana
Ferrus [b. 1953], Spies), and the new South Africa as
a dystopia plagued by poverty, crime, and corruption
(Toerien, Louis Esterhuizen [b. 1955]). In recent years
Afrikaans poetry has seen a narrative turn, with poets
using narrative elements, a parlando style, and a more
accessible manner of writing in reaction to the existing
trad, of hermetic poetry.
Although doubts were expressed about the sustain­
ability of Afrikaans poetry around the change of the
millennium, it regained its vigor and vitality by the
end of the new century’s first decade, showing an in­
crease in the number of volumes pub. since 2005,
as well as a lively interest in the Versindaba Web site
(http://versindaba.co.za/) established to promote Af­
rikaans poetry.
II. English. South Africa first appears in Eng. poetry
in the work of John Donne, John Milton, and John
Dryden, in the wake of the Port. Luis de Camoes, who
creates in his epic The Lusiads (1572) the vivid mytho­
logical character Adamastor to stand for the dangers of
the Cape of Good Hope. Anonymous Brit, visitors to
South Africa, wintering from service in India, brought
poetry to its shores, which, in 1820, became sub­
stantially colonized by Eng. speakers. The first South
Af. Eng. poet as such, Thomas Pringle (1789-1834),
emigrated from Scotland to the Eastern Frontier and
adapted Scottish border *ballads and the Wordswor­
thian reverie for lyrics such as the widely anthologized
“Afar in the Desert.” Pringle also established The South
African Literary Journal in 1824.
In 19th-c. South Africa, the violent conflict among
Dutch speakers, indigenous blacks, and the Brit, gave
rise to an alternate popular trad, of antiemancipation­
ist verse in the person of Andrew Geddes Bain (1797-
1863), who in the Victorian era used his polyglot
resources for humorous purposes. His successor, Albert
Brodrick (1830-1908), wrote of the diamond fields, the
goldfields, and the early process of industrialization.
The Anglo-Boer War, which became a media event

(inch the first newsreels), was the first major occasion
of 20th-c. *war poetry that extended into World War
I. Rudyard Kipling on the jingo side advocated impe­
rial progress; Thomas Hardy mourned the losses due to
the imperial war in poems such as “Drummer Hodge”
and “The Man He Killed.” Meanwhile, Beatrice Hast­
ings (1879-1943), born in London and raised in South
Africa, defended home rule through her writings for
the jour. New Age (1909—14). Black poets, particularly
in multilingual newspapers, began a trad, of protest
against deprivation of human rights, which persists to
the present day.
After the Union of South Africa was established in
1910, Natal produced two major poets whose careers
developed around the cultural magazine Voorslagm the
1920s: Roy Campbell (1901-57) and William Plomer
(1903-73). Both eventually settled in Europe to pursue
right-wing and left-wing politics, respectively. Camp­
bell’s early The Flaming Terrapin (1924) combined in­
fluences from *imagism and *symbolism to assert a
futuristic Af. life force, while Plomer’s successive vol­
umes of 1927 maintained a democratic, satirical view
of the segregated south.
After World War II, many returning soldier-poets,
such as Anthony Delius (1916-89) and Guy Buder
(1918-2001), asserted a “stranger-to-Europe” view of
their local culture with a white Af. sense of belonging
in the subcontinent. This, in turn, produced the jours.,
societies, and academic disciplines that constructed
South Af. Eng. poetry as at least somewhat indepen­
dent of the Brit, mainstream.
With the accession to power of the Afrikaner apart­
heid government in 1948, Eng. as a cultural medium
moved into an oppositional role that has produced a
lit. of resistance written by blacks and whites alike.
The banning or forcing into exile of many poets in
the 1960s, such as Dennis Brutus (1924-2009) and
Mazisi Kunene (1930-2006), further fragmented the
poetry into an international diaspora whose links to
the internal scene were sometimes tenuous. But in
1971, with Sounds ofa Cowhide Drum by Oswald Mt-
shali (b. 1940), a period of intense internal publication
commenced and gave rise to the Black Consciousness
movement, notably in the work of Sipho Sepamla
(b. 1932), Keroapetse Kgositsile (b. 1938), and Mon-
gane Serote (b. 1944), sometimes known (after the
June 1976 uprising) as “Soweto poets.”
The struggle over the end of apartheid, from the
1980s to the 1990s, led poets to question the role and
importance of poetry in resisting continuing effects of
colonialism and reimagining the newly democratic na­
tion after 1994. Important poets of the 1980s include
Douglas Livingstone (1932-96), Lionel Abrahams
(1928-2004), Stephen Gray (b. 1941), Jeni Couzyn
(b. 1942), Christopher Hope (b. 1944), and Jeremy
Cronin (b. 1949). With the transition to democracy,
South Af. poetry—like other postcolonial poetries
in Eng.—has become increasingly transnational and
global in thematic content and cross-cultural formal
experimentation. Writing in traditional Eng. forms,
Ingrid de Kok (b. 1951) borrows from Brit., Ir., Am.,
SOUTH AFRICA, POETRY OF 1331
and Caribbean poetic trads. Born in South Africa but
living in New York, Yvette Christianse (b. 1954) writes
of overlapping Af. Am. and South Af. hists. of racism
and diaspora. Although many South Africans vigor­
ously promoted the antiapartheid struggle, they have
also been sharply critical of the ineffectiveness of South
Africa’s postapartheid governments in transforming the
social order. *Performance poetry by Gcina Mhlophe
(b. 1959), Lesego Rampolokeng (b. 1965), and Vonani
Bila (b. 1972), among others, has been a powerful
venue for making black South Af. experiences seen and
heard, both at home and abroad. A younger generation
of poets includes Seitlhamo Motsapi (b. 1966), Rustum
Kozain (b. 1966), Mxolisi Nyezwa (b. 1967), Gabeba
Baderoon (b. 1969), and Isobel Dixon (b. 1969). Jours,
as diverse as Botsotso, Carapace, New Coin, and Tim-
bila-, the publishing houses Snail Press and Deep South;
and online resources such as Poetry International have
published an abundance of South Af. poems. South Af.
poetry is marked by its ling, and ethnic hybridity: poets
of many ethnic backgrounds borrow from indigenous
and foreign cultural resources to embody the diversity
of South Africa, whether their work concerns violence
and poverty, HIV/AIDS and economic globalization,
race and sexuality, the domestic and the everyday, or
poetry itself.
See AFRICA, POETRY OF; COLONIAL POETICS; POSTCO­
LONIAL poetics; xhosa poetry; zulu poetry.
■ Afrikaans. Anthologies-. Afrikaans Poems with En­
glish Translations, ed. A. P. Grove and C.J.D. Harvey
(1962); The New Century of South African Poetry,
ed. M. Chapman (2002); Groot verseboek Deel 1—3,
ed. A. Brink (2008). Criticism and History: Perspektief
en Profiel Deel 1—3, ed. H. P. van Coller (1998, 1999,
2006); J. C. Kannemeyer, Geskiedenis van die Afri-
kaanse literatuur 1652—2004 (2005).
■ English. Anthologies: Centenary Book of South Af­
rican Verse, ed. E C. Slater, 2d ed. (1945); A Book of
South African Verse, ed. G. Butler (1959); Penguin Book
ofSouth African Verse, ed. J. Cope and U. Krige (1968);
Return of the Amasi Bird: Black South African Poetry
(1891-1981), ed. T. Couzens and E. Patel (1982); Soweto
Poetry, ed. M. Chapman (1982); Modern South African
Poetry, ed. S. Gray (1984); Paperbook ofSouth African
English Poetry, ed. M. Chapman (1986); Penguin Book
ofSouthern African Verse, ed. S. Gray (1988); Breaking
the Silence: A Century ofSouth African Womens Poetry,
ed. C. Lockett (1990); Essential Things: An Anthology of
New South African Poetry, ed. A. W. Oliphant (1992);
The Heart in Exile: South African Poetry in English,
1990—95, ed. L. de Kock and I. Tromp (1996); The
Lava of This Land: South African Poetry, 1960-1996,
ed. D. Hirson (1997); Ten South African Poets, ed.
A. Schwartzman (1999); The New Century of South
African Poetry, ed. M. Chapman (2002); It All Begins:
Poems from Postliberation South Africa, ed. R. Berold
and K. Sole (2003); Botsotso: An Anthology of Contem­
porary South African Poetry, ed. A. K. Horwitz and
K. Edwards (2009). Criticism and History: G. M.
Miller and H. Sergeant, A Critical Survey of South
African Poetry in English M. van Wyk Smith,
1332 SPACE, POETIC
Drummer Hodge: The Poetry of the Anglo-Boer War
(1978); M. Chapman, South African English Poetry
(1984); Companion to South African English Literature,
ed. D. Adey et al. (1986); M. Van Wyk Smith, Grounds
ofContest: A Survey ofSouth African English Literature
(1989); Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid,
Democracy, 1970—1995, ed. D. Attridge and R. Jolly
(1998); S. Nuttall, Entanglement: Literary and Cul­
tural Reflections on Post-Apartheid (2000); A. O’Brien,
Against Normalization: Writing Radical Democracy in
South Africa (2001); D. Attwell, Rewriting Modernity:
Studies in Black South African Literary History (2006);
S. Graham, South African Literature after the Truth
Commission (2009).
L. Viljoen (Afrikaans); S. Gray, O. Hena (Eng.)
SOUTH AMERICA, POETRY OF. See ARGENTINA,
POETRY OF; BOLIVIA, POETRY OF; BRAZIL, POETRY OF;
CHILE, POETRY OF; COLOMBIA, POETRY OF; ECUADOR,
POETRY OF; GAUCHO POETRY; GUARANI POETRY; INDIG­
ENOUS AMERICAS, POETRY OF THE; MAPUCHE POETRY;
PERU, POETRY OF; URUGUAY, POETRY OF; VENEZUELA,
POETRY OF.
SPACE, POETIC. Changing concepts of geographical
relationships and accelerating processes of globaliza­
tion, sometimes referred to as the spatial turn in cul­
tural and social theory, can be identified in mod. and
contemp. poetic practice. Lefebvre, in The Production
of Space, explains that space is produced by human
activity, rather than that activity occurring in an al­
ready existing space. The *free-verse poem can also be
characterized as producing its own space, spreading
over the page in unpredictable ways and ungoverned
by any quantitative or qualitative regularity. Critics
also have consistently questioned the idea of “place,”
a staple of romantic and postromantic poetry. Place
becomes more than a bounded area within space and
the accumulation of its own hists.; for Massey (1994,
2005) and other geographers, it is characterized as
much by its interconnectedness as its exclusiveness.
A “sense of place” becomes relational and its scale
global. While national and regional poetries often
use an idea of place to authenticate national identity
or as unified places of resistance to colonial or impe­
rial power through collapsing hist, into geography
(see Gillian Clarke and R. S. Thomas in Wales, e.g.,
or Seamus Heaney in Ireland), other more experimen­
tal poets (Charles Olson in the U.S. or Roy Fisher or
Lee Harwood in the U.K.) draw on a broader range of
information to demonstrate the incoherent nature of
places and their intersections. *Language poetry, a po­
liticized movement from the U.S. that began in the
1970s, emphasized structuralist and synchronic ling,
relationships within poetry to demonstrate the ways
that lang, asserted and maintained structures of cul­
tural and social power and control. As a consequence,
the Language poets produced work that often lacked
any relationship with an identifiable place in the mate­
rial world. If there is a place in Language poetry, then
it might be the specific poem itself, while space is that
of the general lang, system. More recent poetry in the
U.K. and U.S. has reintegrated a sense of place (and
voice), while avoiding the more reductive or exclusive
claims of earlier place-based work. It has developed
elusive geographies and produced identities that reflect
the process of the production of places and meanings
that slip away or recombine into new meanings as per­
spectives and spatial configurations change.
The poem, in the process of its construction, also
produces the space of the page. If, in an oral culture,
poetry is distinguished by *rhythm and *rhyme (and
Ezra Pound described rhythm as a form cut into
time), then in page-based work, the visual design of
the work becomes a poetic characteristic. A *sonnet,
e.g., may be identified by its shape, and the regularity
of the rhythm and rhyme of a poem such as E. A. Poe’s
“The Raven” may be guessed at by the regularity of the
space it produces on the page. Free-verse poetry—the
poem “All Fours,” pub. in the 1990s by the Brit, poet
Tom Raworth, is one example—often uses the visual
appearance of the poem as part of the overall mean­
ing. In “All Fours,” the title foreshadows the four-line
stanzas, their regularity accentuated not by patterns of
stress or syllabic count but by a broadly similar line
length, an absence of punctuation marks and capital
letters, and the four walls of the house that features
in the poem and a human figure that is on “all fours.”
Other work, ranging from Stephane Mallarme’s Un
coup de des (A Throw of the Dice) to Eugen Gom-
ringer’s “silencio,” uses the space the poem produces
on the page to challenge the reading process itself.
Mallarme’s text is characterized by the distribution of
lines in a variety of fonts across the page in such a way
that no single order to the lines or words is paramount
and that different readings might produce new com­
binations. Gomringer’s “silencio” baffles in a different
way; its design suggests both reading the word from
left to right, with a pause in the center, and a response
that might itself be silence. Later poems by Brit, poet
Bob Cobbing often have no text at all or occasional
broken or fragmented words, and their performance
often consists of subverbal sounds and gestures, giving
a “time” to the space of the page. More contemp. poets
have a range of digital tools with which to combine
the spatial aspects of *concrete poetry with the time­
based aspects of its performance.
A number of spatial concepts have been used to
describe poetic form: the constellation (particularly in
concrete or *visual poetry), the *collage in modern­
ist experimental work, mapping as a process of mak­
ing meaning, the rhizomatic as a description of ling,
relationships in a poem, the nomadic as a process of
inhabiting space without controlling it, and the situ-
ationist derive as a process of composition. Poets and
critics often speak of the “architecture” of the poem
and the ling, material as building blocks, as if the
poem had three-dimensional form. The poetry result­
ing from these concepts tends to be governed by a logic
of coincidence and contiguity. Things happen to be
next to each other at the same time. Rather than the