The sonnet: ruminations on form, sex, and history

Antioch Review, The, Spring, 1997 by Anthony Hecht

The survival of the form. It is astonishing. By comparison, the haiku, originating in the mid-sixteenth century, is a parvenu. There are, of course, a number of other forms with a long history - the ballade, the villanelle, the sestina, the canzone - but these have not enjoyed a continuous life. I can't think of one of them written in English in the entire seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Like certain dance steps, they went out of fashion and were later revived. But from its inception the sonnet has enjoyed a continuous and vital existence. There are, I think, at least two reasons for this, one of them profoundly formal, the other intriguingly sexual. Let's save the sexy one for later.

Once in a conversation with W. H. Auden and a group of his friends, he raised this puzzle of the sonnet's survival powers, and asked us to speculate about how to account for it. He himself volunteered the very probing and suggestive notion that there must be manifest in the proportions of some familiar natural objects (say, the trunk of certain trees in relation to the crown of their branches and leaves) a ratio that corresponded in some way that we unconsciously recognized to the proportions of the two parts of a Petrarchan sonnet to one another, of the octave to the sestet, of eight to six. It was an absorbing puzzle, and no one, including Auden, was able, on the spur of the moment, to come up with any familiar instances of that proportional relationship. I thought about it for years, and eventually came to a tentative solution by way of that highly mathematical art, architecture, and one of its earliest and greatest theoreticians, Vitruvius.

I've written about this at some length in a book called On The Laws of the Poetic Art, so I will offer here only a brief summary. Vitruvius, the leading architect of Augustan Rome, propounded the remarkable notion that great and enduring works of architecture, and particularly of temples, were based on the proportions, one to another, of their various parts in almost exact correspondence to the way the parts of the human anatomy are proportionally related in the body of what Vitruvius called "a well-shaped man." He worked out these relationships in elaborate fractions and in detail; and fourteen and a half centuries later his outline of them served as the basis of an illustration by Leonardo da Vinci of a naked man, inscribed inside a square and a circle, with two sets of arms and of legs, and with the center of the image the man's navel. It has become a very familiar iconic device.

Vitruvius was painstaking in his demonstration that these ideal human proportions, admired not only when encountered in fellow-humans but in the greatest sculptures of ancient times, were the very proportions, recognized somehow unconsciously but kinesthetically and immediately, in those buildings that were most enduringly pleasing and elevating to contemplate. What he is saying is that our bodies react with excitement and with the sympathy of attraction to an edifice whose mathematical proportions we intuit as resembling what we would like to be at our best. This Vitruvian notion is made explicit use of in Yeats's late poem "The Statues."

I'd become familiar with these notions without ever so much as thinking of the sonnet form, and the connection did not occur to me for years until, well after Auden's death - I regret this, because I think he would have approved my small "discovery" - I began reading about architectural masterpieces of the Renaissance, and visiting some of them. I was particularly drawn to the works of Palladio, and to his extraordinary palazzo, the Villa Foscari, known as The Malcontenta. It's worth quoting Rudolph Wittkower's Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism on Palladio's methods:

The geometrical keynote is, subconsciously rather than consciously, perceptible to everyone who visits Palladio's villas and it is this that gives his buildings their convincing quality.

Yet his grouping and re-grouping of the same pattern was not as simple an operation as it may appear. Palladio took the greatest care to employ harmonic ratios not only inside each single room, but also in the relation of the rooms to each other, and it is this demand for the right ratio which is at the centre of Palladio's conception of architecture.

In the Villa Foscari, if the rooms of the smallest width may be designated by the numeral 1, then the rooms across the whole villa, back, center, and front, are designed in the pattern 2-1-2-1-2 (where, by 2, is meant twice the width of 1). Then, from back to front, the rooms' lengths are, respectively, 1 2/3, 2 1/3, and 2. To walk through the villa is to experience, as in many Palladian structures, a space at once serene and grand. But if, now, we formulate a relationship between the whole width and the whole length, we come to 8 x 6, or the very relationship in the two parts of the Italian sonnet.

I write this in perfect confidence that it will outrage certain readers, as well as writers, of poetry - those who believe that poetry is the immediate and spontaneous overflow of strong emotions, that it is entirely a matter of feelings, sensations, impulses, visceral promptings, and that nothing is more alien to it than mathematics and the rigidities of numerical proportions. But there must be some intelligible way of explaining why the Italian form (also called Petrarchan) endured with such Methuselan health, a matter that is only the more puzzling in that the English (or Shakespearean) sonnet (composed of three quatrains rhyming abab, cdcd, efef, and ending in a couplet gg) is infinitely easier for us to write than its Italian forebear (with its octave rhyming abbaabba) in which only two rhyme sounds must serve for the first eight lines. English is not as rich in rhyme words as Italian, and so, while the form is easy and unforced in its original language, it risks becoming something of a tour-de-force in English. And yet, the sonnet in English from Wyatt and Surrey to Wilbur and Berryman has preferred this more demanding form.