The Sonnet provides a comprehensive study of one of the oldest and most popular forms of poetry, widely used by Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, and still used centuries later by poets such as Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison, and Carol Ann Duffy. This book traces the development of the sonnet from its origins in medieval Italy to its widespread acceptance in modern Britain, Ireland, and America. It shows how the sonnet emerges from the aristocratic courtly
centers of Renaissance Europe and gradually becomes the chosen form of radical political poets such as Milton. The book draws on detailed critical analysis of some of the best-known sonnets written in English to explain how the sonnet functions as a poetic form, and it argues that the flexibility and
versatility of the sonnet have given it a special place in literary history and tradition.
Author(s): Stephen Regan
Series: llustrated Edition
Edition: 1
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2019
Language: English
Tags: Literary Criticism, Poetry, Sonnet, English Literature
Cover
THE SONNET
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Contents
Introduction
The form of the sonnet
The origins of the sonnet
The politics of the sonnet
1: The Renaissance sonnet
Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
Sir Philip Sidney
Edmund Spenser
William Shakespeare
John Donne, George Herbert, William Drummond, and Lady Mary Wroth
John Milton
2: The Romantic sonnet
Anna Seward, Charlotte Smith, and Helen Maria Williams
William Bowles and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
William Wordsworth
Percy Bysshe Shelley
John Keats
John Clare
3: The Victorian sonnet
Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Matthew Arnold
George Meredith
Gerard Manley Hopkins
4: The Irish sonnet
W. B. Yeats
Patrick Kavanagh
Seamus Heaney
Paul Muldoon
Ciaran Carson
Michael Longley and Eavan Boland
5: The American sonnet
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Jones Very, William Cullen Bryant, and John Greenleaf Whittier
Emma Lazarus, Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, and Trumbell Stickney
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Robert Frost
T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, and Wallace Stevens
Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Gwendolyn Brooks
Edna St Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, and Anne Stevenson
John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and Sylvia Plath
Ted Berrigan and James Merrill
Marilyn Hacker, Rita Dove, and Shane McCrae
6: The modern sonnet
Rupert Brooke
Charles Sorley and Siegfried Sassoon
Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden, and Ivor Gurney
W. H. Auden
Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Jennings, and Geoffrey Hill
Tony Harrison
Douglas Dunn, Edwin Morgan, and Kathleen Jamie
Andrew McNeillie, Don Paterson, and Carol Ann Duffy
Wendy Cope and Eleanor Brown
Ken Edwards, Tony Lopez, and Robert Hampson
Andrew Motion and Alice Oswald
Epilogue: The sonnet and its travels
Bibliography
Sonnet anthologies
Critical studies of the sonnet
Primary sources
Secondary sources
Index
