Villanelle - History

History

The villanelle originated as a simple ballad-like song with no fixed form or length. Such songs were associated with the country, and were thought to be sung by farmers and shepherds, in contrast to the more complex madrigals associated with sophisticated city and court life. The French word villanelle comes from the Italian word villanella, which derives from the Latin villa (house) and villano (farmhand); prior to the nineteenth century, the term would have simply meant country song, with no particular form implied — a meaning it retains in the vocabulary of early music.

The modern form of the villanelle, containing the nineteen-line dual-refrain, derives from Jean Passerat's poem "Villanelle" (French: “J’ay perdu ma Tourterelle”), published in 1606. The chief French popularizer of the villanelle form was the 19th-century author Théodore de Banville; Banville was led by Wilhelm Ténint to think that the villanelle was an antique form.

Although the villanelle is usually classified as a French form, by far the majority of villanelles have been written in English. Edmund Gosse, influenced by Théodore de Banville, was the first English writer to praise the villanelle and bring it into fashion with his 1877 essay "A Plea for Certain Exotic Forms of Verse". Gosse, Austin Dobson, Oscar Wilde, and Edwin Arlington Robinson were among the first English practitioners. Most modernists disdained the villanelle, which became associated with the overwrought formal aestheticism of the 1890s; i.e. the decadent movement in England. In his 1914 novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce includes a villanelle written by his protagonist Stephen Dedalus. William Empson revived the villanelle more seriously in the 1930s, and his contemporaries and friends W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas also picked up the form. Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night" is perhaps the most renowned villanelle of all. Theodore Roethke and Sylvia Plath wrote villanelles in the 1950s and 1960s, and Elizabeth Bishop wrote a particularly famous and influential villanelle, "One Art", in 1976. The villanelle reached an unprecedented level of popularity in the 1980s and 1990s with the rise of the New Formalism. Since then, many contemporary poets have written villanelles, and they have often varied the form in innovative ways.