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The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Hey folks, it's Jack. Let's talk about comfort. What does that word mean for you? It might be the comfort of being well rested. No tossing and turning, just deep, refreshing rest with support for your back and good organic materials like wool and latex to keep you cool. No more sweating at night. Trust the wisdom of Mother Nature. Comfort might also mean putting your money to good use, investing in a product that's smart for your health, your home and the planet. That's where Avocado Green Mattress comes in. It's an eco friendly, health conscious choice from a company that values transparency and ethical practices. It's the right mix of luxury and sustainability. Better for you and better for the planet. Head to avocadogreenmattress.com today and check out their mattress and bedding sale. Avocado dream of better.
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Hello, Happy Holidays. We're over the hump of Christmas and sliding towards the New Year and I am cleaning up our archives. These are the shows that, for one reason or another, have fallen out of our archive. Been lost for a while. Today we reclaim an episode that's all the way from 2018. The sonnet. I'm dusting it off, sprucing it up, cutting out the extraneous material and delivering the goods. Like Santa Claus arriving a few days late. Maybe you could say we've returned the gifts that didn't quite fit and we're exchanging it for one that is the right size and color. Happy Holidays. Okay, let's get started. I'm Jack Wilson and this is an episode on the history of the sonnet. It's one of the simplest and best known forms in all of poetry, and since the 13th century, it's been the vehicle for some of the greatest expressions of love and often other subjects in the history of thought. A sonnet, said the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, is a moment's monument. Who invented the sonnet and who brought it to prominence? How has it changed over the Years. And why does this form continue to be so compelling? Let's jump right in and hear from the most famous practitioner of sonnets, William Shakespeare. This is Shakespeare's Sonnet 18. Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and summer's lease hath all too short a date. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, and often is his gold complexion dimmed, and every fair from fair sometime declines by chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd but thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow', st. Nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade, when in eternal lines to time thou grow'. St. So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee. An Ode to Sonnets and sonnet writing. Sonnets can preserve, can record, can live forever. The sonnet is a curious phenomenon when you think of it, when you think about it. 14 lines. Find 14 lines. That's it. Sometimes rhymed according to certain schemes. Sometimes rhymed according to a different scheme. More recently, not rhymed necessarily. Iambic pentameter at the beginning. At the outset. The earliest sonnets, a little less tied to that. Now, it's a simple form, very simple. A couple of rules. And those rules are flexible. And yet. And yet, even in this simplest form, we can identify the number of people who have written sonnets. Here we go. Here's a partial. Petrarch, Dante, Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Wyatt, Milton, Yeats, Auden Frost, Lowell Bishop, Philip Larkin, Spencer Keats, Wordsworth, Rupert Brooke, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Donne, Anne Sexton, Louise Glueck, Vezra Pound, Sylvia Plath, Rita Dove, Langston Hughes, Rilke, William Blake, Coleridge, John Berryman, Neruda. Wrote a hundred, at least. Michelangelo wrote them. Yes, that Michelangelo. The painter T.S. eliot even snuck one into the wasteland. I could go on a lot longer. I created that list from memory, more or less. It's much harder to find a poet of significance in the past 500 years who never wrote a sonnet. Pope and Dryden, 18th century. Masters of the heroic couplet. Didn't go for sonnets. More recently, HD Avoided them. And Marianne Moore appears not to have written a sonnet. E.E. cummings, you might think. Except that. No, he should have been on my first list because he did write them. It's like an exercise that poets have been drawn to over and over for centuries. Why is that? Let's take a Different approach. Here we know when the sonnet was invented and who invented it. But I'm actually going to start at the end. Whenever we talk about how things change, I can sense people jumping ahead. How do things evolve? We think. We ask the question. And some of you out there start thinking creatively. The wheels start turning. You start thinking, Hey, 14 lines. That's been done to death. How about if I do a sonnet with 13 lines? Well, that's been done. So you say, okay, well, I'll do one with 15 lines. Guess what? Robert Lowell beat you to it. And so did Shakespeare, for that matter. And you keep going. You want to be new. You're creative, right? So you say, well, how about a sonnet where every line is one word that actually is an entire form? It's called a word sonnet. How about one where there are no words at all? A wordless sonnet. Surely I've. I've invented something there. Well, that is innovative. Except you're not the first. The poet Mary Ellen Salt has already done it. How about a satirical sonnet? A sonnet that explodes the whole idea of sonneteering. Well, take it away, Shakespeare. Here we go. My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun. Coral is far more red than her lips. Red if snow be white. Why then her breasts are done. If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damask'd, red and white, but no such roses see I in her cheeks. And in some perfumes is there more delight than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak. Yet well, I know that music hath a far more pleasing sound. I grant I never saw a goddess go. My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground. And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare as any she belied with false Compare. That's Sonnet 130. But you're thinking, no, no, no, I can do better. How about. I know. How about dueling sonnets? Well, that's been done, too. How about a sonnet in search of an author? William Carlos Williams wrote just such a poem. Ghost sonnets, Chinese sonnets, Sonnet cycles. Done. Done. Done. Holy sonnets. Done by. Done. In fact, John Donne, that is. How about a sonnet where every line is a sonnet? Done. Cubist sonnet. Let me point you toward Ms. Gertrude Stein and her poem Susie Asato. How about 15 sonnets that are linked by the repetition of the final line of one sonnet as the initial line of the next, and the final line of that sonnet as the initial line of the previous, the last sonnet consisting of all the repeated lines of the previous 14 sonnets in the same order in which they appeared. Well, I applaud you for being creative, but you're not innovative. That's that exists. It's called a crown of sonnets, and Marilyn Nelson wrote a good one. How about this idea? You say, okay, I'm not going to be inventive, but I'm going to be productive. I'm going to write five sonnets a day, and at my death, I will leave behind a half a million sonnets that tell the entire story of my life. Well, sorry, my ambitious friend. It's a great idea. I encourage you to do it. But you will not be the first. You will be the second person to do that. How about this one? Two lovers meet. They start exchanging lines. Their lines form a perfect sonnet, including their final two lines to one another, which they trade back and forth, completing their sonnet with a brilliant final couplet. A marvelous idea, my friend. And it's how romeo met Juliet 400 and some years ago. The point here is that the sonnet has a rich tradition. It's a tradition that might seem daunting, might seem like kind of a straitjacket, not only for aspiring poets, but for readers as well. Why do we have to follow this structure or live within these restrictions? Why can't we be free? But poets already have shown how free you can be within the sonnet form. So don't think it's a form you can demonstrate the weakness of. Don't think you can come up with something to demonstrate that sonnets no longer matter. Sonnets are going to outlast us all. You cannot defeat the sonnet, and you will not. It's better to jump in and celebrate this form, not to worship at its feet, but to explore its many facets and watch the best poetic minds as they see what they can do with it. And we can learn from their examples and delight in all of it. Let's delight in the sonnet, not as an old, stodgy thing, but as an exciting, dynamic thing. The word sonnet means little song in Italian. Now let's sing the praises of this little song. Let's sing a song of sonnets. Hey, maybe that's our innovation. Aha. Now we have something, right? We could sing a sonnet. Well, you know where this is headed. That's been done by Rufus Wainwright, who Sang Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 from the album Take All My Loves 9 Shakespeare Sonnets, which sets Shakespeare's sonnets to music. How about this? How about we take pop songs, Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and turn the lyrics of those songs into sonnets? Rock. Well, there's a whole tumbler that does that for you. Speaking of computers, an automatic sonnet generator. You plug in a few words and it kicks out a sonnet that exists. We'll hear one. I made one about the podcast. We'll hear that at the end of the show. How about we take tweets and turn those into sonnets? Already done. Write sonnets, cut them up, and arrange the words and fragments into new poems. That's a 50 year old tradition, my friend. Poets have already been hard at work doing that. The sonnet sees you. The sonnet anticipates your every move. A story about a poet. A story that imagines that poetry is like Hollywood and a poet is taking meetings and trying to get his poem produced. Directors compete to make a movie out of his poem. Well, Martin Amos already wrote that story. It's called Career Move. And the poem that is the toast of Hollywood in that story, it's called Sonnet. Of course, you could get back at Martin Amos tweaking poetry this way by writing a poem about the novelist. Except that W.H. auden already wrote such a poem. It was, of course, a sonnet. Let's stop this fanciful business and turn back to the history of this glorious form. Understand that there have been as many creative minds trying to turn the form upside down and inside out and stretched in one direction and stretched back in another. Compressed, expanded, blown up, blown out, crossed out, crossed up, jacked up, knocked down, kicked around, exalted, revered, examined, discarded. Everything, it seems, has been done to the sonnet except one. Ignored. It's hardly ever been ignored. Let's look at the history. So we know where the sonnet came from. We already know where it's going. It's zooming into the future with all of these innovations that I've told you about. In fact. In fact, that's probably where it lives and has always lived. We look at the past, but the sonnet seems like it's living in the future, waiting for us to catch up. The history of the sonnet after this. Foreign. Hey folks, it's the holidays, which means you need energy and a robust immune system. 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The sonnet comes from sometime around the years 1222 to 1225. It comes from Sicily, from the court of Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor. Frederick II was an interesting guy, a great fan of the arts, and a great patron of poets who wrote in a variety of languages for him. Sicilian, of course, and Greek, as you might expect, but also Arabic and other languages too. One of these poets was a notary, which is a little more than what we call a notary in America. It's closer to a lawyer. In any case, this lawyer poet was named Giacomo da Lentini, and he struck the poetic equivalent of a mine of gold or a gushing oil well. 14 lines. Apparently he was mashing up two forms, a pair of quatrains followed by a pair of triplet stanzas. If you do the math there, that's eight plus six, which gets us to 14. And this perhaps came from a Sicilian folk song form that he had recently heard. That's one theory for where Lentini found These earliest sonnets, that it was a way of saying something and then singing it. I'm ordinarily not a big fan of rhyme schemes and tracking that. It always seems to me kind of a. A boring high school exercise kind of secondary to the poetry. It turns poetry into crossword puzzles or Sudokus or something, and I don't really care for that. I don't care what the degree of difficulty is for the poet. I care about the words and the way they make me think and the way they make me feel. But with sonnets, I'm going to make an exception, and we'll talk a little bit about the form, because there's something magnificent about the way this particular form has ignited such a wildfire of creativity of across countries and through the centuries. So I am interested in how the form changed, because you can see creative minds wrestling with the differences. Sometimes they innovate, sometimes they stick to tradition. Both can be beautiful, and I wouldn't say one is more beautiful than the other. I don't care about innovation for the sake of innovation, and I don't give a lot of extra credit for innovation, just as I don't give a lot of credit for following a form slavishly. It's within the form employed by the poet that I look for beauty. But let's play along and see what poets we're working with. The purest and earliest sonnets, the dalentini form, was 8 and 6, or 4, 4, 3, 3 if you like. There is what's called a volta or turn that comes between lines 8 and 9. So after you do that pair of fours and you do the volta and you turn, and then you come to the final three. D' Alentini himself wrote in Sicilian. The next big development came when a man called Guittone d' Arezzo took the sonnet into Tuscany, started writing sonnets in Tuscan, about 300 of them. These were popular with Tuscan poets, and his example was quickly followed by Guido Cavalcante, a name you might have heard, Andante Alighieri, which is a name you've certainly heard. We're into the 14th century now, and one of the great sonnet writers of all time, Petrarch, picked up on the form and wrote his beautiful sonnets to Laura. A hundred years later, Tuscans were still writing sonnets, including Michelangelo. And then the form caught on in England. Some English poets used this 4, 4, 3, 3 structure that Lentini had put in place. Others developed something 4, 4, 4, 2. Instead of 8 lines with a turn to the final 6. Now we had essentially 12 lines of development and then a strong reversal, a strong volta, a strong closing couplet. Later in the show, we'll have some speculation on why this change happened and backing up a bit, why 14 lines was chosen at all. Where did that even come from? We will see. The early English sonneteers included Thomas wyatt, writing around 1542, and Henry Howard right around the same time. Both of these men published translations of Petrarch and original sonnets written in English. A generation or two later, 1580 to 1610, we might say, saw a great flourishing of the form. The great poet and classicist Ben Jonson didn't write sonnets, but just about everyone else of this era did. Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Raleigh, and of course, William Shakespeare, who might single handedly deserve credit for the sustained success of the sonnet in English. Had he never written a play. Shakespeare might not be quite a household name, but I think he'd still be quite famous among lovers of poetry for his sonnets. We've heard a couple already. Let's hear another. This is Sonnet 116. Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove. Oh no. It is an ever fixd mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken. It is the star to every wandering bark whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle's compass come. Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved. Hmm, wasn't that good? I'm tempted to just keep reading sonnets, but as we get more into the innovations, I think the oral versions of sonnets start to lose some of their power. They become a visual medium as well as an oral medium. The handsome, robust shape of the words on the page, the rough symmetry and solidity of the way the 14 lines of iambic pentameter look starts to be different. Your eye notices something different now. A sonic can look thin, almost wan. Jagged edges look different. And the rhyme scheme changes too. End rhymes are different. When the lines overflow and you see the rhyme, your eye catches it, but the ear might not detect it as an n rhyme. Milton started running the lines over. Milton also changed the subject from love to whatever was on his mind, including politics. John Donne was another one from this period, just after Shakespeare, who wrote about God and other metaphysical ideas. There was a gap and develop. Pope and Dryden dominated the poetic scene with their heroic couplets. But then the Romantics picked it back up. Blake wrote one at a very young age, probably as a teenager and possibly even before. His was very unusual. One line ended with the word the, and another ended with the word with which, as far as I know, not even Milton or Dunn ever tried. Wordsworth credited Milton's sonnets with leading him to pick up the form, recognizing its power and beauty and seeing the possibilities of. Of. Of applying this form to subjects other than love. Here's one I've always liked about modernity and nostalgia for simpler times. The World Is Too Much with Us by William Wordsworth. The world is too much with us. Late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. Little we see in nature that is ours we have given our hearts away a sordid boon. The sea that bares her bosom to the moon. The winds that will be howling at all hours and are upgathered now like sleeping flowers. For this, for everything we are out of tune. It moves us not. Great God, I'd rather be a pagan suckled in a creed outworn so might I, standing on this pleasant lea. Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn. Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, or hear old Triton blow his wreathd horn. Here's another great Wordsworthian sonnet composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802. Earth has not anything to show more fair. Dull would he be of soul who could pass by a sight so touching in its majesty? The city now doth like a garment wear the beauty of the morning Silent bare ships, towers, domes, theaters and temples lie open to the fields and to the sky, all bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Never did sun more beautifully steep in his first splendor. Valley, rock or hill ne' er saw, I never felt a calm so deep. The river glideth at his own sweet will. Dear God. The very houses seem asleep. And all that mighty heart is lying still. Hmm. After Wordsworth, the other Romantics followed. Coleridge wrote sonnets and And Byron and Keats. The later Romantics went back to the Italian 86 form for some of them. I wish we had time to read all of these. I love Bright Star and on first looking into Chapman's Homer by Keats and Ozymandias and England in 1819 by Shelley. But we're going to jump to the Victorians who were crazy about sonnets, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose book Sonnets from the Portuguese is a classic. We'll read one here, famous for its brilliant opening line, how do I love thee? By Elizabeth Barrett Browning. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach when feeling out of sight for the ends of being an ideal grace. I love thee to the level of every day's most quiet need. By sun and candlelight. I love thee freely as men strive for right. I love thee purely as they turn from praise. I love with a passion put to use in my old griefs and with my childhood's faith. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose with my lost saints. I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears of all my life. And if God chooses, I shall but love thee better after death. We're fully in the 19th century now, and we find sonnets everywhere, from George Meredith to Gerard Manley Hopkins to Walt Whitman to Edgar Allan Poe. Herman Melville wrote a sonnet. It was about a shark, and it was 16 lines, and somehow that seems just perfect for Melville had to be about a creature swimming in the water. And it had. He had more, he wanted to say, than the form could safely hold. It reminds me of a pizza they used to offer at the Medici. They would. They would offer all their pizzas in thin crust and deep dish. And there was one, the garbage pizza, where they put so many toppings on it, they couldn't sell it as a thin crust. They just said it was crossed out of the menu. And it said structurally unsound. That's a little bit like Melville and his sonnet Bursting at the Seams. Okay, moving on to the 20th century. The German poet Rilke was a great practitioner of sonnets, including one of my favorite poets of all time, Archaic Torso of Apollo, which changed my life. Here it is. Archaic Torso of Apollo. We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp in which his gaze now turned to lo. Gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so. Nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs and to that dark center where procreation flared. Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur, would not from all the borders of itself burst like a star. For here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life. So good. So good. That last line just pierces me even now. Oh, is it too late to change my life? Guess it can't be. Okay, so good. Here's a masterful sonnet by Yates. Leda and the Swan. This one alludes to the Greek myth where Zeus takes the form of the swan and seduces Leda, which eventually results in Helen. When you think about it, it's a pretty powerful idea. Shocking and horrifying. Yeats captures its majesty and terror. Leda and the Swan by William Butler Yeats. A sudden blow, the great wings beating still above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed by the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill. He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push the feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body laid in that white rush, but feel the strange heart beating where it lies, the shudder in the loins engenders there, the broken wall, the burning roof and tower, and Agamemnon dead, being so caught up, so mastered by the brute blood of the air, did she put on his knowledge with his power before the indifferent beak could let her drop. Robert Frost has a nice sonnet. This is in the format he uses is 33332 Acquainted with the Night by Robert Frost I have been one acquainted with the night. I have walked out in rain and back in rain. I have out walked the furthest city light. I have looked down the saddest city lane. I have passed by the watchman on his beat and dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain. I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet, when far away an interrupted cry came over houses from another street. But not to call me back or say good bye. And further still, at an unearthly height, one luminary clock against the sky proclaimed that time was neither wrong nor right. I have been one acquainted with the night. Hmm, 20th century, but still pretty traditional and with that wonderful Frostian musicality. We're going to have an episode on Frost this year. We have a good guest lined up for that. Okay, here's another one from the 20th century, so unlike a traditional sonnet that I didn't even notice that it was a sonnet when we discussed it way back when in our dad Poetry episode with our friend Professor Bill Robert Hayden's those Winter Sundays Those Winter Sundays. Sundays too. My father got up early and put his clothes on in the blue black cold. Then with cracked hands that ate, ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze no one ever thanked him. I'd wake and hear the cold, splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he'd call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, speaking indifferently to him who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know? What did I know of love's austere and lonely offices? No end rhymes in that poem, very modern. And then comes a poet like William Carlos Williams who upends the form. Short lines, not rhyming. And the stanzas are 32342 adds up to 14 if we didn't get the hint from the number of lines. The poem is called Sonnet In Search of an Author by William Carlos Williams. Nude bodies like peeled logs sometimes give off a sweetest odor. Man and woman under the trees in full excess, matching the cushion of aromatic pine drift fallen threaded with trailing woodbine. A sonnet might be made of it, might be made of it. Odor of excess, odor of pine needles, Odor of peeled logs, Odor of no odor other than trailing woodbine that has no odor. Odor of a nude woman, sometimes odor of a man. But even though modernism exploded the sonnet, that doesn't mean they can't still be written in traditional ways. Here's one from the 20th century. Postmodern. Well, not postmodernism during modernism, I would say by Langston Hughes. I'd say it's modernism adjacent. Listen to how he's still loyal to the older forms of the form. I think of this as being like Picasso drawing a beautiful naturalistic drawing, a perfect representation of reality, a kind of throwback to the days before the innovation, the abstraction, the more visionary work. Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth. My sinful earth these rebel powers array. Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth? Painting thy outward walls so costly gay, why so large cost, having so short a lease? Dost thou upon thy fading mansions spend? Shall worms inheritors of this excess eat up thy charge? Is this thy body's end? Then soul, live though upon thy servant's loss, and let that pine to aggravate thy store Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross within Be fed without, be rich no more. So shalt thou feed on death that feeds on men and death once dead, there's no more dying Then modern poets, contemporary poets. Sonnetting is still being done. I think it's the right sweet spot. It's hard enough. It has enough structure that it's a challenge, but it's loose enough to allow creativity. You can feel good about filling that many lines, finding that many rhymes, if you're using rhymes. But it's not so overwhelmingly bizarre or challenging that the form threatens to push you around the way some other forms do. Looking at you, Villanelle readers know the form of a sonnet. It's familiar, but it doesn't read like a trick, a party game. It reads like a good length for a poem, a kind of natural weight and heft. It occupies our attention, and by now, of course, we're well trained to read poems of this length. We know that it's going to end. We know it will have a turn at some point. We have some expectations, and the poem might meet them, which is satisfying. Or it might overturn them, which is also satisfying. Little jolt of surprise. It's neither too long nor too short. It's the Goldilocks of poetic forms. That still doesn't answer the question why 14 lines in the first place? Why did that catch on? Why not 10? Why not 12? Why not 16? Let's take our last break and see if we can answer that question. Ford Blue Cruise Hands Free highway driving takes the work out of being behind the wheel, allowing you to relax and.
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Foreign. Why 14 lines in a sonnet? There's some speculation that Dalentini was writing at the same time that Arabic numbers were being imported into Sicily and Italy. And there was there's some kind of theory of the forms or harmonious forms, and I heard this a few years ago on a radio show. I've never been able to figure out what this means. The idea is that 14 has a harmoniousness to it mathematically. It's somehow what they call a beautiful number, something about eight plus six, which is four followed by three. I don't exactly follow it, other than to say that maybe it's what builders use 4, 3. It's the start of the base of a pyramid. I tried to look this up, and I heard that Fibonacci was attached to it. He was the mathematician who made a sequence in which every number is the sum of the two numbers that precede it. So let's say you start with 0, and then you have 1. Then your next number in the series will be 1, because 0 plus 1 equals 1. And then the next number after that will be 2, because now your sequence is 0, 1, 1, 2, 2, 1 plus 1 equals 2. You can guess what the next one will be. 1, 2 will equal 3, 2 plus 1 equals 3, and so on. So your next number is 5 and then 8 and then 13 and then 21. And I don't know. I don't know how that gets to 14. Skips over 14. But I did learn that there's such a thing called a Fibonacci sonnet in which you follow the Fibonacci numbering system for sentences. The first sentence has one word and the next one has two, then three, then five and so on. And you do that for 14 lines. And so your final line, I think what they do is they go up to 21 and then go back down to 1. There are many examples of this online of the Fibonacci sonnet. Math fans, you're welcome. Think I'll stick to Shakespeare. So is there a Natural reason why 14 is the number? 16 seems harmonious too, right? A perfect square. 4, 4, 4, 4. That's. What's his names? Moses Malone. Right. Fo, fo, fo, fo. Path to a championship. Okay, 4, 4, 4, 4. But that's 16. That doesn't work. 10 also has a beautiful symmetry to it. Solidity. That could be a. Why not that? For the number of lines. Nine is practically a legendary number, a hall of fame. Number 7 is everyone's favorite lucky number. 12 would be the number of disciples, and 13 would be the number of disciples plus Jesus. I do like the idea that 14 gives you lots of possibilities, not because it's balanced, but because it isn't. If you have 16, it cries out to be 4, 4, 4, 4 and 12. That's 6 and 6 or 4, 4, 4 or 4 threes. 14, though 7 and 7 doesn't work naturally, does it? Odd plus odd, though. The poet John Clare liked those the best. He would write four, he would write seven. His sonnets would be seven plus seven, and sometimes they would be seven pairs of two, which hardly anyone else did. Then you have eight and six. You have four, four, four, two, five, five, two, ten, two, three, three, three, three, two. Those have all been used. Maybe that's why 14 is. Is the key. It's kind of 12 plus two. As I mentioned, though, the strongest case for this seems to be that there were two Italian forms already, the octave and the sestet. Eight lines and six lines, and Dalentini just put two of them together, peanut butter into his chocolate, and so on. Vice versa. But that doesn't explain why these 14 line poems took off so sharply, or why they've endured for so long. There's some kind of speculation that a sonnet replicates the human face. Apparently the human face in its ideal form has a proportion of 4 to 3, like 8 to 6, which is 14 of the sonnet. The forehead, eyes and nose take up 4/7 of the face. The lips and chin take up the bottom three sevenths. A sonnet, it is speculated, is like staring into the eyes of a lover for the first eight lines, then pressing your lips to hers or his for the final six. Is that possible? Well, I guess it might play into it when we are dealing with our subconscious. Who knows? When it comes to numbers and the way they feel, feel, there are a whole lot of things it could be. Would I say that's the only reason? Is because of this connection to the face and a kiss? No, I would not. Here's an explanation. I like the idea that 8 and 6 is a buildup that gets quicker. Eight lines develops a pattern. It feels weighty. You have four pairs. It's like a roller coaster going up the tracks, chugging, chugging, chugging, chugging. A journey. And then there's. Then there's the volta, the turn. And the six lines feel quicker when you just have eight. Six. Six is faster. So that's like the rush down. Or some have said it's like the feeling you get when you're returning home. It's always a little faster to come home than it is to leave, right? So maybe 14 works for us on that level. Eight a little on the heavy side, six a little on the quick side. It's the opposite of plotting. It's big enough to be substantial and yet it still feels spry. In the Italian version, there are two rhymes in the eight, but three rhymes in the six. Again, is that feeling a little spry? Is that a little ponderous, serious up front? Then a little joyous, little flippant, little dance dancing, A little jig in the second one? Who knows? I guess you might know if you read Enough of these. You can tell me. In the English version, we have four. Four, four, two. Think about how that works. Bang. Four, four, four. You're expecting four, but no, you get two. Bang. Snap shut. Snaps tight. That final couplet is like the loud crack of a firework as the colorful lights fade into the night sky, leaving us with our changed thoughts. It's a great wrapping up, a summary, a twist. When English sonnets fail, it's usually because this final couplet is no good. The firework is a dud. And what about all the others, the 15 lines? Robert Lowell did this with the 15th line, commenting on the act of writing the sonnet. Kind of like that. Kind of like that political cartoonist who always draws himself in the bottom corner of his cartoons where he has one other little joke, usually kind of meta, about a guy drawing the cartoon, some interesting funny thought in his head. Or there's 13 lines, which is designed to emphasize our fractured world, our disjunctive world, the impossibility of completion. It leaves you hanging a 13 line sonnet. You're waiting. What about the next line? Oh, that's all I get. Oh, jarring. Or what about those one word lines that I mentioned before, the word sonnets. You can see now why the sonnet has been called a billowy tent. It looks like a solid structure. It might even be tethered with something like four corners. But it is not a rigid hut or a box or brick walls. The sides are as sheer as silk and they stretch and blow in the wind, sometimes in, sometimes out, sometimes holding fast, sometimes curling up to the sky. At this point we've transcended whatever power the 14 line verse originally had. A poet today is not just using the number 14 because it's good and it works. He or she uses the number 14 because Shakespeare did too, and all the thousands of other poets who have come before. The poet picks up the pen and writes 14 lines because the sonnet form is there. If it were 13, he or she would do that. It's a way of incorporating the history of poetry and also creating something new. It puts you squarely in a tradition and yet allows you to be original. Maybe 9 and 12 and 13 and 16 and 10 were already taken, already had something for those numbers. And 14 was there waiting for its object, like a Scoragami score, waiting to have an NFL game attached to it. I suggested at the beginning that there isn't a way to be original with a sonnet. And maybe there isn't. At least with respect to form. Everybody's Done. Everybody's thought it. Everybody's done it. There's a. There's a sonnet form where every line is a whole sonnet. There's a wordless sonnet. How are you going to top a wordless sonnet? People have been. The theorists have been there before you people. But who cares about getting weirder and weirder when there's room for content to be original and there's this opportunity to have a fusion of content and form. If you write a sonnet, the world could use a little less arguing, a little less selfishness, a little less ego. Sorry, theorists. The world could use a little more reflection, a little more purity of expression, a little more considered thought, a little more artistry, a little more quiet ambition, a little more feeling, a little more love. So write your sonnet. We have a lot of them already, but that doesn't matter. Clearly we need a few more. So here's one from me. Guess what? You know, I'm a bad poet, so I didn't try to write a sonnet for this, but guess What? Back in 2018, I found a sonnet generator online. This is pre AI, people. Unless this is a rudimentary form of AI. I typed in my thoughts about the History of Literature podcast, and I got back Ode to the Podcast, which was a sonnet by Jack. I'm going to play that for you now. Let's see if this sonnet can replicate the kind of feeling and humanity that we heard when we listened to the greatest sonnets, those by Elizabeth Baird Browning and William Wordsworth and, of course, William Shakespeare. Let's hear it.
- [52:13]
D
Oh. To the podcast. A sonnet by Jack. My rich podcast, you inspire me to write. I love the way you inform and delight. Invading my mind day and through the night. Always dreaming about the great fortnight. Let me compare you to a humble crust. You are more modest and more ambitious. Hard heat toasts the meek rollicks of August and summertime has the golden delicious. How do I love you? Let me count the ways. I love your auspicious friendly and smart wanting. Your unusual fills my days. My love for you is a zealous upstart. Now I must away with a worthwhile heart. Remember my plain words whilst we're apart.
- [52:59]
A
Mmm, not great, computer friend. The first quatrain isn't too bad. My rich podcast, you inspire me to write. I love the way you inform and delight. Okay. Invading my mind, invading my mind day and through the night. Always dreaming about the great fortnight. Who are you? Who are you? Why are you? Why are you talking about the Great Fortnight? What does that have to do with the podcast? Goes off the rails. But then the next stanza, even worse. Let me compare you to a humble crust with a question mark. Why is that a question? Let me. Let me compare you to a humble crust. That would be. If it made any sense at all. That would be a command. Doesn't need a question mark. Maybe it's questioning its own sanity at this point. And then. My love for you is the zealous upstart. What the heck? That whole quatrain is awful. How do I love you? Let me count the ways. That's the. We're now in the third quatrain. That's basically plagiarized. Cross that line out. I love your auspicious, friendly and smart meaningless drivel. Wanting your unusual. Fills my days. A little provocative. If a human wrote it, I would say interesting. Computer writes it, I say mistake. You don't know the rules of vocabulary and grammar. And the last line. My love for you is the zealous. No, the last line. Yeah, the last line of that quatrain. My love for you is the zealous upstart. Huh? Okay, with all due respect to our computer overlord. Our computer overlords, this is an awful poem. Maybe AI has improved since then, but guess what? I kind of doubt it. Sonnets are for humans. They're by humans. There are four humans, and when they're at their best, they are human. Okay, that's going to do it for this reclaimed episode. All the way back in 2018, and we have recovered it. And guess how we ended it? With one last sonnet. That's what I give you here as we listen to the theme music. It was a word sonnet, 14 lines of one word each. Imagine these words running down the page with one word in each line. Here we go. I am Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time. Not bad, right? You're welcome, dear listeners. And now I'm going to sign off. It might sound familiar to you, but now that you know that my sign off is so secretly a sonnet, a revered, vaunted form of poetry, a relative of all those wonderful poems from the past seven centuries or so, it may never strike you the same way. Is it a sentence or is it a sonnet? I'll never tell. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.
- [56:48]
D
Hi, it's Reese Gorman, congressional reporter and host of the brand new podcast on Notice. This is the new podcast from Notice the nonpartisan newsroom covering politics and policy in Washington, D.C. each week I'll bring you real conversations with members of Congress and those who make the Hill run. And it's packed into just 30 minutes so you can learn a lot without taking too much time out of your busy day. Join me for On Notice. That's Notice spelled N o t u s available every Monday wherever you get your podcast or on YouTube.
- [57:24]
B
Why have three Gilmore Girls in a small town resonated with generations of fans? And what does a TV series that ended nearly two decades ago reveal about who we want to be? Generation Gilmore Girls is a brand new three part podcast series that looks for answers where it all began in Connecticut. Hosted by me, Chloe Nguyen and produced by Connecticut Public, the same award winning NPR and PBS member station behind the chart topping podcast Generation Barney. This series is about the TV we love and how it shapes us. We'll take you inside the creation of Gilmore Girls, why we keep revisiting it, and the impact the show has had on its home state. Whether you're a longtime fan or new to the show, this podcast offers fresh insights and heartfelt nostalgia. Follow Generation Gilmore Girls on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you're listening now. Trust me, it's worth the trip back to Stars Hollow.