Art, Life, and the Sonnet
The 2025 Frost Farm Poetry Conference Keynote Address
This essay is an edited version of the keynote address delivered at the 2025 Frost Farm Poetry Conference. It is the sixth and final essay in NVR’s 2025 series on metrical poetry. You can find the first five entries here:
James Matthew Wilson and J.V. Cunningham, “J.V. Cunningham’s Counter-Revolution”
Brian Brodeur, “A Gnat’s Horizon”
Susan Delaney Spear, “Ad Fontes: Measure By Measure”
M.I. Devine, “A BOMB IN A CATHEDRAL”
Robert Charboneau, “On Some Virtues of the Heroic Couplet”
Introduction
Good evening Friends and Fellow Poets.
Let me begin by saying what an honor and a pleasure it is to be here with all of you this weekend at the 10th anniversary of the Frost Farm Poetry Conference, and to serve as keynote speaker and faculty member. This is such a storied place, the source and fount of so much great poetry, written by Frost himself, of course, but also written by poets who have come here in search of his spirit, which surely still haunts this place, blesses it with his presence. I’m a Catholic, I believe in ghosts. And therefore, I believe Robert Frost is with us tonight, listening, glad to know his work continues to inspire ours.
Given his quiet presence, it seems a good idea to begin our conversation this evening by talking about the chief element that draws us all to Frost’s poems—and draws us to this conference, as well—the beauty and power of formal verse.
As poets, we have all heard the siren song of rhyme, felt the need to write—and rewrite—our lines so that they fall into a regular pattern, thumping our fingers on the table (as I do when I write), counting out syllables, sounding out stresses—trying to turn our poems into linguistic music—as well as trying to tell the stories we need to tell.
This evening I’d like take a few minutes to consider why we feel this powerful attraction to rhythm and rhyme, and then I’d like to explore one particular formal poem that uses metrical verse to advantage—my favorite lyric form, and soon to be yours—the sonnet.
The Power of Song
In his fine essay “Poetry As Survival,” poet Gregory Orr notes that poetry exerts its power by giving us “access to its primordial ordering principles of story, symbol, and incantation to set against our disorderings.” When I teach this essay to students, I like to alter Orr’s trilogy slightly by referring to “The Three S’s : Story, Symbol, and Song.” (What poet can resist alliteration?) While story and symbol refer solely to the content of the poem, song participates in meaning while also refering to the means by which that content is delivered. Of these three key elements, song is the most visceral and instinctive. Song, or incantation, consists mainly of repetition, rhythm, and rhyme, all of which derive, ultimately, from the rhythms of time, the creation, and our bodies. Orr reminds us that “incantation is the most primitive (and powerful) of linguistic forms. We encounter it constantly in tribal poetries. It also appears spontaneously in the rhythmic moans of grief and orgasm, lament and ecstasy.” Repetition soothes and consoles us, as we know from the experience of convulsive sobs that wrack us when we grieve. Repetition helps us to pray ourselves into a meditative state, as we know from reciting the Rosary or chanting a Buddhist mantra. Repetition casts spells, as any reader of Shakespeare’s Macbeth or J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter knows.
As children, we are infatuated with rhythm, rhyme, and repetition. Before we can even read, we delight in nursery rhymes and jump-rope songs, ballads and the play of poems. I remember the pleasure of reciting “Three six nine, the goose drank the wine, the monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line” and “Hey, diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon” over and over again for no good reason other than the sound of them. As a five-year-old I could recite from memory the whole of Clement C. Moore’s “The Night Before Christmas,” as somehow the magic of Moore’s meter and rhymes also conveyed some of the magic of Christmas.
Even before we fell in love with words, we fell in love with rhythm. After hearing the constant thrum of our mother’s heartbeat for nine months, we were born into a chaotic world where that rhythm was suddenly, terrifyingly absent. Is it any wonder babies seek out rhythmic rocking, the soothing sounds of a mother’s or father’s voice singing them to sleep? Our bodies are constant rhythm machines, heartbeat upon heartbeat, systole and diastole, inhale and exhale. We are consoled by the regular rhythms outside of ourselves found in the music of the natural world—the ebb and flow of the ocean at the shore, sunrise and sunset, the cycle of the seasons. We are also delighted by the music we human beings are driven to make and perform and embody by singing. The material world speaks to us in a way our bodies instinctively understand and respond to. And language, especially poetic language, does this too.
The Sonnet
Amid the many forms of poetry that use meter and rhyme, it is noteworthy that there is one particular form that is identified by a musical name, “sonnetto,” the Italian word for sonnet, meaning “little song.” Whether it be a Petrarchan sonnet, with its insistent rhymes (abbaabba cdcdcd), the more variously rhymed Shakespearean version (abab cdcd efef gg), or one of the many variations created by the Romantics and by more recent poets, particularly Robert Frost, who was a master of the sonnet—this little 14-line wonder offers all of the sonic virtues of formal poetry in spades.
In addition, the sonnet also offers the poet and reader a paradigm for a journey. Each metered line in the sonnet measures both time and distance. It is a marvelous poetic fact that each line consists of a series of metrical “feet,” one step followed by another. These lines then gather into a fourteen-line chapter, each one constituting a station along the journey the poet/pilgrim/reader makes. It is another marvelous poetic fact there are as many lines in the sonnet as there are stations in the Stations of the Cross—did I mention that I was Catholic? The Stations of the Cross tell the story, in 14 movements, of Christ carrying his cross from Lion’s Gate in the city of Jerusalem to Mount Calvary. Seen through the lens of this tradition, the sonnet retraces the Via Dolorosa, and the road to Calvary serves as a template for the universal human pilgrimage.
Of course, this particular numeric coincidence may be particular to my imagination, given my formation as a Catholic, but be that as it may, it certainly enters into my sense of the sonnet as a poem that is marvelously suited to recounting a journey. By the end of a sonnet—any sonnet--the poet finds him- or herself in a different place, as does the reader, and is altered, in some way, by the experience of the journey. The change is not a physical one but, rather, an intellectual and a spiritual one. Sonnets can lead us into spaces and places we have not been before and help us see the world anew.
The Sonnet as Seduction: An Exercise in Pedagogy
In an addition to being a reader and writer of poetry, I am a long-time teacher. Ostensibly, I am a professor of literature. I want my students to learn about the great poets of the past and present. But I have another—secret—agenda. I want them to fall in love with poetry.
So, every Fall and every Spring, about 2/3 into the semester, after three months of discussing great books with them, listening to their responses, gaining their trust, I invite them to write poetry.
Not just any kind of poetry. I ask them to write a sonnet.
And not just one sonnet. I ask them to write fourteen.
Most of these students have never written a single line of verse. Most have never had a burning desire to read poetry, let along write it. They are majoring in Computer Science, Biology, Journalism, Business—practical disciplines designed to get them a job in a field that has nothing to do with poetry (or so they think).
They greet my invitation the same way students have greeted it for the 20 years I have been extending it.
First, SURPRISE: “What a ridiculous idea!”
Then, DENIAL: “Nope. I can’t write poetry. I don’t even like poetry!”
Then, INTEREST: “Why are you inviting me to do this?”
Then, SUBMISSION: “I dunno. Sounds crazy. Maybe I’ll try it.”
Finally, after they have, beyond all expectations, penned their first sonnet, WONDER:
They have written a poem for the first time in their lives. They are proud of it. It says something important that they could not say any other way. They want to write another one.
I call this process a “seduction” with some trepidation—especially given the sonnet’s tradition as a form that celebrates erotic love. These young poets-in-the-making are most definitely being seduced, but not by me, their teacher. I am an innocent bystander, watching while they are being seduced by poetry—and the sonnet is the key.
Falling in Love
Better than any rom-com movie is watching your students fall in love with language. We begin by discussing the sonnet structure—the elegance of the two-part Petrarchan sonnet, the cleverness of the four-part Shakespearean innovation created to accommodate the Italian sonnet to our rhyme-poor English language.
We then move on to the nearly natural way in which the iambic pentameter line seems to mimic English speech. As Frost himself once noted, there are only two forms of metrics in English: strict iambics and loose iambics.
We remark on the pleasures of listening to alliteration, assonance, and consonance, and then we marvel at the tautness of the sonnet, which gives you only 140 syllables—more or less, depending upon what innovations the poet might like to make—in which to say something meaningful.
And as we acknowledge the power of this little linguistic engine that takes you to a place in the process of writing it that you never expected to go—they slowly become smitten and are initiated into the mysteries that many poets before them have known. It is the mystery of ATTENTION (which, according to Simone Weil, is a form of prayer), the mystery of CRAFT, the mystery of formal verse that enables us to discover a voice within ourselves, a register of speaking, that we didn’t know we had.
Granted, there is a practical side to this experiment I am encouraging them to engage in. They can choose to write a 12-page research paper, or they can write 196 lines of poetry for their final project of the semester.
Fool that I am, I am not foolish enough not to know that 99 percent of my students initially choose to write the 14-poem sonnet sequence because they think it will be easy, or, at least, less laborious than writing an essay. What they soon discover after embarking on their projects is that it is neither easier nor less laborious—nor is it less time consuming. Quite the contrary.
Work vs. Play
What they also discover, after writing their first sonnet, is that while writing a research paper is most certainly work, writing sonnets is a form of play. They learn to enjoy the thrill of the hunt—the challenge of finding rhymes that do not sound forced (thanks to the assistance of RhymeZone and the existence of slant rhyme), of choosing the exact word needed to describe an object or an experience rather than the close-but-no-cigar word, of counting out syllables on their fingers and listening to their lines, of clothing their seemingly ordinary thoughts and impulses in language that sings its own song.
Anyone who enjoys puzzles or patterns or word games enjoys writing sonnets. They activate that part of our brain that seeks to find—and to impose—order on disorder. And the magic of writing sonnets is that as we are imposing order on language, we are creating order out of the chaos of our own experience. When we write a poem about an episode from our childhood—as some of us will be doing in our poetry conference’s Master Class this weekend—we understand that flashback from our past better than we did before we penned the sonnet’s first words.
Surprise!
This brings me to another reason my students—and we ALL—fall in love with writing sonnets: the element of surprise. In the midst of creating their projects, I ask them to read Frost’s wonderful essay “The Figure a Poem Makes,” wherein he bluntly asserts this maxim: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” Frost reminds us of the effects writing poetry has on the poet: “The initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.” This “glad recognition” leads the poet, word by word, syllable by syllable, to a state of wonder. To write a sonnet is to discover something about yourself anew.
In this same vein, I also ask my students to read the poem “Ars Poetica?” by Czeslaw Milosz in which he explores the perils of the poetic process, since the discoveries we make might not always be welcome news:
In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent, a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us, so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out and stood in the light, lashing his tail.
The journey poets embark on is not entirely a safe one. To invoke yet another writer who knows a thing or two about the writing process, Flannery O’Connor once warned that in order to write with honesty and integrity we need to be willing “to follow the spirit into strange places and to recognize it in many forms not congenial to [us],” to boldly go places where we would rather not go.
What Frost, Milosz, and O’Connor are saying, in their differing ways, is that writing is a spiritual, as well as a physical, intellectual, psychological, and emotional enterprise. It requires a leap of faith and a disposition of trust. When we write we open ourselves up and turn ourselves over to something larger than ourselves. This is why lines, images, and sometimes entire poems seem to arrive from out of nowhere. We become channels of this inspiration, instruments played upon by this mighty wind, the Ruah that sustains all creation.
It is a fearful thing to thing to fall into the hands of the living God, states the anonymous author of the Book of Hebrews.
It is also a fearful thing to write poetry.
My students are willing to enter into this mysterious experience and to dwell there for the space of 4-6 weeks while they are writing and revising their sonnets because they find this thrilling. As a number of them have told me, as well as their fellow students, writing poetry makes them feel more alive.
Empowerment
Writing sonnets also empowers them. One of my favorite days of the semester is Sonnet Workshop Day, when my students share their projects with one another. Up until now, they have been working in isolation, as we poets do, conceiving and revising their poems, trying to make them as good as they can be.
(As an aside, another extraordinary element of this project is that students tend to work very hard on their poems, mostly because they are focused on a subject that lies closest to their hearts—themselves. This is not an academic exercise. It is a plunge into the realm of truth-telling and myth-making. They are bards, inventors of their own histories, not merely reporters on other peoples’ thoughts.)
My students have told me that reading the sonnets written by their classmates and colleagues is a profoundly moving experience. They discover things about one another they did not know, despite our three months together, our twice-weekly conversations, our gatherings as a community of readers and scholars. They admire the honesty, the intimacy, and the imaginative capacity of their classmates to turn their lives into art. And they admire the craft of their sonnets.
Listening to my students critique one another’s projects is music to this poet-professor’s ears. I love to over-hear the generous advice they give one another, using nerdy poet terms like octave and sestet, quatrain and couplet, enjambment and caesura, half-rhyme and mono-rhyme, epigraph, ekphrasis, and elegy. They have learned so much and so quickly, and, even more remarkable, they have learned these techniques by practicing them rather than reading about them. They have become expert readers of sonnets, as well as makers of them—can discern a weak line from a strong one, take delight in an inventive metaphor and counsel against the lazy lapse into cliché we are all guilty of from time to time to time. A whole semester’s worth of reading and analyzing poems by great writers has not taught them what 4 weeks of writing their own sonnets has.
Art and Life
This leads me to my final observation about the value of writing sonnets—for students, yes, but for any and all of us.
As makers of art we become more appreciative of the art produced by others. We understand, experientially, the demanding process of making a formal poem, allowing us to see its architecture, to hear its music, to participate in its power, and to receive its beauty. This appreciation of and receptivity to art spills over into a fuller appreciation of and receptivity to life. Writing enlarges our imaginations and our sympathies, even as it focuses our vision, enabling us to perceive the providential design of our world, wherein each and every aspect of creation serves a high and holy purpose. This includes our fellow human beings. As poet William Blake once wrote, “Everything that lives is holy.”
Our sonnets also remind us—if they are true and if they are any good at all—of our limitations. Writing poetry reminds us that we are all radically broken and imperfect and very much in need of redemption. The same is true of our fellow human beings. That “discovery” is one we cannot make often enough. This finitude is what binds us together on this fragile, beautiful, seemingly doomed planet. Art helps us to reach beyond that finitude. I think this is what Dostoyevsky means, in part, when he writes “Beauty will save the world.”
Conclusion
I believe this is a message Robert Frost intimates in many of his poems, as well. His New England terrain is a rugged and rough place. Life is painful and difficult, marked by suffering, loneliness, and loss. What softens and humanizes our hard lives—what saves us—is language, especially the language of poetry. And so it seems appropriate here on Frost Farm, this evening, to conclude this brief talk on the power of the sonnet by reading one of the Master’s sonnets—a poem that features Eve as the first poet and speaks of the enduring power of the human voice to make its mark on the world and to make that world intelligible and beautiful to us:
NEVER AGAIN WOULD BIRDS’ SONG BE THE SAME
He would declare and could himself believe
That the birds there in all the garden round,
From having heard the daylong voice of Eve,
Had added to their own an oversound—
Her tone of meaning but without the words.
Admittedly an eloquence so soft
Could only have had an influence on birds
When call or laughter carried it aloft.
Be that as may be, she was in their song.
Moreover her voice, upon their voices crossed,
Had now persisted in the woods so long
That probably it never would be lost.
Never again would birds' song be the same.
And to do that to birds was why she came.“To do that to birds” is why WE are all here.
Happy conference, everyone!
May our workshops be playful, surprising, inspiring, and empowering.
And may there be many sonnets!
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, PhD, is a professor, poet, scholar, and writer at Fordham University, where she serves as Associate Director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. Her publications include two chapbooks and nine full-length collections of poems. Her book Holy Land (2022) won the Paraclete Press Poetry Prize. O’Donnell’s eleventh book of poems, Dear Dante, was published in Spring 2024. She is currently at work on the manuscripts of two new collections, one tentatively titled Body Songs, poems on embodiment, and The View from Childhood, poems about family, coming of age, and the place(s) we call home.
 | A guest post by
|
So good to know! Thanj you! Please do come to the Frost Farm Conference next year. It's a wonderful gathering!
Thank you!