This essay is adapted from a lecture delivered at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, on January 10, 2010, at the winter residency. My thanks to The American Poetry Review for their graceful and gracious assistance in the adaptation.
In Phillis Levin’s introduction to The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, she writes that “fourteen lines do not guarantee a sonnet: it is the behavior of those lines in relation to each other—their choreography—that identifies the form” (xxxvii–xxxviii). Later she explains, “We could say that for the sonnet, the volta is the seat of its soul” (xxxix). The volta, or the turn, is crucial to the identity of the sonnet. For many theorists, the volta itself marks not merely the emergence of a new form, but the formal embodiment1…
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The American Poetry Review (Digital) - 1 Issue, May/June 2020