Volta (literature)

In poetry, the volta, or turn, is a rhetorical shift or dramatic change in thought and/or emotion. Turns are seen in all types of written poetry.

The turn in poetry has gone by many names. In "The Poem in Countermotion", the final chapter of How Does a Poem Mean?, John Ciardi calls the turn a "fulcrum". In The Poet's Art, M.L. Rosenthal employs two different terms for different kinds of turns: "gentle modulations, or at the furthest extreme, wrenching turns of emphasis or focus or emotional pitch (torques)".Hank Lazer primarily refers to the turn as a "swerve", asking, "Is there a describable lyricism of swerving? For those poems for which the swerve, the turn, the sudden change in direction are integral, can we begin to articulate a precise appreciation? Is there a describable and individualistic lyricism of swerving?" What Leslie Ullman calls the "center" of a poem largely is the poem's turn.

Author and historian Paul Fussell calls the volta "indispensable". He states further that "the turn is the dramatic and climactic center of the poem, the place where the intellectual or emotional method of release first becomes clear and possible. Surely no sonnet succeeds as a sonnet that does not execute at the turn something analogous to the general kinds of 'release' with which the reader's muscles and nervous system are familiar."

According to poet-critic Phillis Levin, "We could say that for the sonnet, the volta is the seat of its soul." Additionally, Levin states that "the arrangement of lines into patterns of sound serves a function we could call architectural, for these various acoustical partitions accentuate the element that gives the sonnet its unique force and character: the volta, the 'turn' that introduces into the poem a possibility for transformation, like a moment of grace".

Called the volta in sonnets, the turn is a vital part of almost all poems. Poet-critic Ellen Bryant Voigt states, "The sonnet's volta, or 'turn'...has become an inherent expectation for most short lyric poems." Poet-critic T.S. Eliot calls the turn "one of the most important means of poetic effect since Homer."Kim Addonizio refers to the turn as "[t]he leap from one synapse to another, one thought to a further thought, one level of understanding or questioning to being in the presence of the mystery". In "Levels and Opposites: Structure in Poetry", Randall Jarrell says that "a successful poem starts in one position and ends at a very different one, often a contradictory or opposite one; yet there has been no break in the unity of the poem". Such a transition is executed by the turn.

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