Wilkins, Ernest H. "The Invention of the Sonnet." Modern Philology. 13(8) Dec., 1915), 463-494.

Over the weekend, I finished a review of a book of sonnets for one of the magazines I write for, and although I have all the requisite knowledge of what sonnets are and the different types, I still wanted to have scholarly stuff around me. Maybe it was to give me the gravitas I won't ever have; maybe I genuinely wanted to know how the sonnet was invented. Or maybe I just like tables about line endings in medieval Italian sonnets.

Anyway, so what you're looking at here is a table the outlines the way lines end in the first eight lines, or octaves, in the first 31 sonnets every written in Italy in the early 13th Century. There's a couple theories out there that the octave is in fact a vestige of an earlier form, with the sestet as a kind of extended mix version or add-on. It was a pretty fascinating afternoon of light research, even though it was beautiful out in Albany and I should have gotten outside.

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