‘Beauty Bare: The Sonnet Form, Geometry and Aesthetics’

Abstract

The appeal of the sonnet form over centuries is bot h unquestionable and curious. Most poets attempt a sonnet at one time or another in th eir career, and many readers in English, as well as other Western languages, have e ncountered a sonnet or two. While some might see the sonnet as an old-fashioned form, poets continue to produce them in great quantities, and new collections and studie s of them continue to appear. Zachariah Wells, editor of one sonnet anthology, at tributes the form’s longevity to its “adaptability, flexibility, plasticity” through his tory. 3 Others are more mystical in their ideas about the persistence of the sonnet: “Poets,” Don Paterson reflects, “write sonnets because it makes poems easier to write. Rea ders read them because it makes their lives easier to bear”. 4 There is a long-held perception that sonnets teach us something about the very nature of poetry, especial ly in relation to poetic form. This is frequently cited as the justification for insist ing that creative writing students try to write them, and that literature students learn to r ead them. But aside from the structural rigour of the form ‐ with the attendant assumption that the more restrictive the form, the greater the poetic challenge (haikus have a similar status in this respect) ‐ the actual reasoning behind the idea of the sonne t’s edifying qualities remains vague. Similarly, the sonnet’s aesthetic qualities are fr equently proclaimed, but slippery and difficult to articulate. Paul Oppenhei mer writes that the sonnet has a “mysterious aesthetic” that reveals “a psychologica l, as well as an aesthetic, law, or equation, or archetype” that makes it one of the mo st “secure and enduring forms in poetry”, but he remains vague as to what that is, p recisely. 5 Paterson connects the aesthetic and the psychological appeal of the sonne t: “a miraculous little form in which our human need for unity and discontinuity, r epetition and variation, tension and resolution, symmetry and asymmetry, lyric inspi ration and argumentative rigour, are all held in near-perfect oppositional balance” (xxvi-xxvii). It is frequently seen as having a meditative quality (xvi) ‐ an interiority, which Oppenheimer suggests is due to its non-musical, purely literary, history of cir culation. He provides convincing proof that despite the popular idea of sonnet meaning “little song,” it was always