Strange Voltas

Formally, virtually every sonnet is, at least in part, a concrete poem that looks like a sonnet. That is, when one looks at a block of text, one can gather pretty quickly that it’s a sonnet, or at least a near-sonnet. However, a sonnet is not only a formal but also a structural construct, if by structure one means, specifically, the pattern of a poem’s turning. A sonnet in English does not only consist of 14 lines of (perhaps) iambic pentameter (perhaps) in a rhyme scheme. A sonnet also contains at least one significant turn—a significant shift in rhetorical and/or dramatic trajectory—called a volta. Numerous commentators have recognized the importance of the volta to the sonnet. In Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, Paul Fussell states that the volta contributes “something indeed indispensable to [a sonnet’s] action.” In her introduction to The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Phillis Levin even goes so far as to call the volta “the seat of [the sonnet’s] soul.”

Taking the volta into consideration, one sees a sonnet differently: not as a static block of text but as a reactor, catalyzing and channeling flows of linguistic energy. If one were to make a heat map of where the dynamic action of a sonnet takes place, the white heat would be at the volta. Typically, this means that the heat map would glow brightest in the Petrarchan tradition at the turn from octave to sestet, or else, when mapping a Shakespearean sonnet, at the turn into the final couplet.

And yet, though this understanding advances conceptualization of the sonnet’s workings, it still is too staid, nesting the crucial volta in some fairly predictable ways. Commentators are still coming to more systematically realize that—as the large-scale shift from its Italian to its English position indicates—the location of the volta in fact has long been not something settled but rather another occasion for poetic experimentation. In “On Sonnet Thought,” Christina Pugh states, “Whether it occurs before the closing couplet in the Shakespearean sonnet, before the sestet in the Petrarchan scheme, or elsewhere in a sonnet, the volta’s often breathtakingly indefinable pivot remains a vital component of the governing structure.”

This essay will consider voltas that occur “elsewhere” in sonnets in order to demonstrate that even the volta’s location has long been a site of poetic experimentation and, in so doing, offer new ways to appreciate some more recent American sonnets. It will reveal that, while sonnets always ask readers to expect the unexpected, readers need to be alert to the shifting location of the volta, as such shifts not only amplify surprise but also contribute greatly to a sonnet’s signification by underscoring or undercutting—enacting or effacing—meaning.

Poets have been experimenting with the volta’s location almost since the birth of the sonnet. Much of the prose of Dante’s La Vita Nuova—a sequence of poems to and about his beloved Beatrice along with a running commentary on the verse—involves the poet’s explication of his poems, and this explication is largely specifically structural, helping readers to better engage the actual sinewy rhetorical and dramatic dynamism of the sequence’s lyrics—most of which are sonnets—rather than merely imposing stereotypical expectations upon them. In her introduction to her translation of La Vita Nuova, Barbara Reynolds suggests that Dante is trying to instruct readers who are acquainted and preoccupied with the features of poetic form as to how to read his poems more vitally and accurately. Reynolds states, “What is interesting is that [Dante] evidently thinks it necessary to make clear to fellow-poets and instructed readers where the counter-divisions occur. Perhaps he considered that preoccupation with the form of poetry or with its embellishments was tending to obscure lucidity of thought.” Reynolds pursues this thinking, noting,

These severely arid analyses of poems . . . are really an invitation by Dante to enter his study and stand beside him while he runs a finger down the parchment page of his manuscript. “Look,” he seems to be saying, “. . . What I want...