POETRY AND ITS TYPES ~ Literary Hunt

The Major Forms of Poetry

(A) The Sonnet
(B) The Ode
(C) The lyric
(D) The Epic
(E) The Mock Epic
(F) The Idyll
(G) The Pastoral
(H) The Elegy and the Pastoral Elegy
(I) The Ballad
(J) The Satire

We will discuss them below :

(A) The Sonnet

It is one of the earliest forms of poetry. The
term 'sonnet' is taken from the Italian 'Sonnetto' which means "a little sound". The origin of the sonnet is uncertain. Some scholars hold that it first originated from Provence or Sicily in Italy while others believed that its origin can be traced back to the Greek epigram. However, the earliest Sonnets written by great Italian poets Dante (1265-1321) and Petrarch (1304-1347). The first English Sonnets appeared in Tottel's Miscellany of
Songs and Sonnets, a collection of lyrics and sonnets written by various known and unknown poets of the 16th century. Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1518-1547), well-known poets, contributed their Sonnets to this Miscellany. Shakespeare, Sidney.
Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, etc., have also written Sonnets.

Type and Rhyme Pattern of Sonnet

A sonnet is a short poem that has 14 lines. These are iambic pentameter lines linked by an intricate rhyme scheme. The two major types of sonnets are as follows :

The Italian or Petrarchan Sonnets

The Petrarchan Sonnets are named after the well known Italian poet, Petrarch. These sort of sonnets consists of two main parts. The first eight lines form the Octave which has the rhyme scheme of

ab ba ab ba

while the remaining six lines form the sestet with the rhyme schemes of :

cde cde
or
cdc cdc
or
cdc dee

In Sonnets Octave may also be divided into two stanzas of four lines each, called the quatrains, and the Sestet into two stanzas of three lines each called the tercets.

Miltonic Sonnets

The Petrarchan sonnets are also called Miltonic Sonnets because some sonnets were written by Milton. He followed the Petrarchan rhyme scheme. There are only 24 Miltonic sonnets but all are so superb in thought as well as artistic finish. Therefore after Shakespeare, Milton is considered the greatest sonneteer in English.

The English or Shakespearean Sonnet

The Petrarchan pattern was not blindly imitated by the Elizabethan sonneteers. So, they introduced their own rhyme scheme though retaining the number of lines in a sonnet at fourteen. In English Sonnets, there are three quatrains of four lines each and a couplet of two lines. The rhyming scheme of an English sonnet is

ab ab, cd cd, ef ef, gg.

This pattern was adopted by Shakespeare so, it is now known after his name.

The Spenserian Variety

Spenser also adopted the Shakespearean
pattern with a little modification in the first three quatrains. Spenser interconnected the first three quatrains while the last two lines formed a couplet as in Shakespeare. So, the rhyme scheme of Spenserian Sonnets are :

a b a b, b c b c, c d e d, e e

sn.no	Title of series	Year of publication	Poet's
1	Astrophel and Stella	1598	Sir Philip Sidney
2	Amoretti	1595	Spencer
3	Sonnets	1609	Shakespeare
4	Diana	1592	Henry Constable
5	Delia	1592	Samuel Daniel
6	Phillis	1593	Thomas Lodge
7	Callie	1597	Fulke Greville
8	Sonnets	1645	John Milton
9	Holy Sonnets	1633	John Donne
10	(1) River Duddon Sonnets; (2) The Ecclesiastical Sonnets	1822	Wordsworth
11	House of Life	1881	D. Rossetti
12	Sonnets from the Portuguese	1850	Elizabeth Barret Browning
13	Modern Love	1862	George Meredith

POETRY AND ITS TYPES

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