What makes a poem a sonnet?

Well, both of those poems are considered sonnets by the "Cortland Review" editors who included them in a sonnet feature a few years ago. I don't consider either of them sonnets, and a lot of other readers would not consider them sonnets.

There are sonnets, like Robert Frost's "Oven Bird" and Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias" than use non-traditional rhyme schemes. There are even blank-verse sonnets that don't use rhyme at all. (Although there are some readers and critics who would not recognize any unrhymed poem as a sonnet.)

Even quite traditional sonnets, including many by William Shakespeare, use some metrical variations. They're mostly in iambic pentameter, but not every single line consists of 10 syllables arranged in five iambic beats. That kind of deviation from strict form (like the use of slant rhymes rather than perfect rhymes) doesn't prevent a poem from being considered a sonnet.

If a poem jettisons some or all of the traditional sonnet hallmarks -- line count, rhyme, meter -- yet some intelligent readers still call it a sonnet, they usually do so because of something like "the structure of the poem's argument," which is much harder to define than simple basics like rhyme and meter. You can do some reading on the idea of the "turn" or "volta" in a sonnet if you want to explore the idea of structure and argument in greater depth.

That issue of "Cortland Review" included this article by Tony Barnstone. It might not convince you that the Gubernat and Stallings poems are really sonnets, but it will give you some ideas about the thinking that accepts them as part of the sonnet tradition.

http://www.cortlandreview.com/features/06/december...

Many (not all) sonnets follow a certain logical pattern as well. Petrarchan sonnets, for instance, often pose a problem or a question in the first 8 lines, and then solve the problem, or answer the question, or try to do so but admit failure, in the last 6. Shakespearean sonnets often re-state the problem or question using different imagery or metaphors in each of the 3 quatrains, then attempt to answer it (or not) in the couplet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (who also invented his own version of meter called "sprung rhythm") invented the "curtal sonnet," which is three-quarters of a Petrarchan sonnet. The first part is 6 lines, not 8; the second part is 3-and-a-half lines, not 6 (3.5 is three-quarters of 6). But it follows the same logical organization as the full-sized sonnet.

A sonnet is a form of a poem that originated in Europe, mainly Italy: the Sicilian poet Giacomo da Lentini is credited with its invention.[1] They commonly contain 14 lines. The term sonnet derives from the Italian word sonetto, meaning "little sound". By the thirteenth century, it signified a poem of fourteen lines that follows a strict rhyme scheme and specific structure. Conventions associated with the sonnet have evolved over its history. Writers of sonnets are sometimes called "sonneteers," although the term can be used derisively. One of the best-known sonnet writers is William Shakespeare, who wrote 154 of them (not including those that appear in his plays). A Shakespearean, or English, sonnet consists of 14 lines, each line containing ten syllables and written in iambic pentameter, in which a pattern of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable is repeated five times. The rhyme scheme in a Shakespearean sonnet is a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g; the last two lines are a rhyming couplet.

Traditionally, English poets employ iambic pentameter when writing sonnets, but not all English sonnets have the same metrical structure: the first sonnet in Sir Philip Sidney's sequence Astrophel and Stella, for example, has 12 syllables: it is iambic hexameters, albeit with a turned first foot in several lines. In the Romance languages, the hendecasyllable and Alexandrine are the most widely used metres.

They are still considered sonnets - straying from the form a bit for content or dramatic effect has precedence. I mean you can't stray too far - but 9 syllables instead of 10 and the result is effective - is still a sonnet.

The sonnet form evolves. This site gives some better overview: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/sonnet.h...