Jordan Gulino - Annotation Four of "Frederick Dougla**" by Robert Hayden lyrics

A Formalist and Structuralist Reading of Robert Hayden's "Frederick Dougla**" Robert Hayden's "Frederick Dougla**" employs a specific poetic form: the sonnet. Originated as a form of sophistic rhetoric, the sonnet was established in ancient Greece by Aristotle as a deductive method of proving one premise by first establishing the parameters and truth of two previous premises. This is seen in a more modern context through the three-tiered structure of the sonnet: problem, solution, turn, or: octet, sestet, volta. Aristotle originated this form, known as the syllogism, as a means of proving conditional truth. The sonnet in the modern sense derives from the Italian reinvention of this Aristotelian model; Petrarch, who popularized the sonnet in medieval and Renaissance Italy, influenced later European poets Spencer and Shakespeare, who further popularized the poetic form. Hayden draws upon this poetic history to legitimize his commemoration of Dougla**. Working within the limitations of a sonnet, a form usually relegated to the immortalization of love, Hayden casts Dougla** as a figure capable of super-human, almost martyr-like love. It is important to note that in Hayden's poetic era, formalism, that is, the use of established poetic forms and topoi, had fallen out of fashion. Revolutionaries like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot had shown that form can be bent and broken in the name of reinvention and modernity. Hayden, almost in answer to this, writes a sonnet that aspires to the old model, hearkening back previous ages of poetry in which the adherence to form was the highest honor a poet could bestow on his subject.