The Sonneteer

A demonstration of structured form

View the repository through any of the indexes

The Sonneteer is two things at once. It is a library of sonnets, and it is a demonstration of open standards-based e-text technologies (in this case, XML) in support of a focused, but generalized, application: presenting a loose collection of poems with some attention to their formal aspects.

Thanks are owed to supporters including old friends and associates of every description, and especially to early XML developers who designed and built the tools that made these experiments possible - and laying the ground for what we see today.

A library of sonnets

Indexes to the sonnets

• by author
• by title
• by first line
• by rhyme scheme

The sonnet makes a fascinating study because it encapsulates in miniature the entire development of English-language prosody from the Early Modern Period (as early as the court of Henry VIII), when English poetry became newly exposed to Italian courtly forms, through to the present.

More could be said — but here, will not be — about the intrinsic interest of the sonnet as a poetic form, about its singular and revealing history, and about how its formal qualities may be echoed, albeit framed and even “confined” or teased, in the automated modes of text processing that drive this experiment. The Sonneteer springs, in fact, from a set of technologies designed for all kinds of writing, yet “tuned” here for the sonnet.

Any poem here may be viewed in a visual layout framed to the expectations of either a strict Petrarchan sonnet (octaves and sestets), or the looser Elizabethan (quatrains with a couplet): in this way some kind of contrast between the two extremes may be more evident, and how each single poem fits one or the other, or neither or both. The fact that a given instance does not “fit” a particular view of the sonnet form is part of what these presentations are meant to dramatize. The rhyme scheme of a sonnet is often the surest guide to how strictly it adheres to the unwritten rules; but attention also has to be paid to the rhetorical flow of argument from one quatrain to another, to where the bridge or “turn” is (sometimes it strays from the normative position after line 8), to whether a couplet is pronounced in the final two lines, to metrical phenomena such as enjambment, and so forth.

The reference view of poems in this collection is designed to look reasonably good when printed. For that matter, if you find yourself interested in these, you probably know that any number of excellent collections of English poetry are available in more portable or more amenable forms. Patronize your local book store!

Occasionally, the Sonneteer has allowed the indulgence of a few notes on one or another particular poem: these also appear in the reference view. For the most part, this collection will have to speak for itself.

An XML demonstration

See the XML source of any poem in this library by selecting source code. (Or link to source.html to see what the source of this page looks like.)

The materials on this site are delivered to your web browser in a language it can understand (HTML): but the source text files are created and maintained in a format designed just for that purpose, and therefore superior for the tasks. The site shows, in a simple way, how even a small XML tag set can be put to work to support fairly complex and scalable operations, much more simply and effectively than is now possible using other formats. Many claims can be and have been made for XML and for certain design principles that may be applied to XML systems. This site exercises such principles in an effort both to test and define them.

Sonnets! Sonnets! Sonnets!

• Eric Blomquist's Sonnet Central has the most thoughtful, painstaking and amazingly large collection of sonnets on the net.
• The sonnet form is not only an English one! check out Sonetos del Siglo de Oro: Golden Age Spanish Sonnets.
• A Google search for “sonnet history” picks up some good stuff. Or search for “sonnet form”.

Dedicated to sonnet-writers everywhere.

The Sonneteer was developed by Wendell Piez, July-August 2003, and minimally modified when migrated to new platforms, March 2006, February 2016.