Meta: for further reading (sonnet week)
Sep. 30th, 2012 07:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnhammer posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
poetreeThe Making of a Sonnet, ed. Eavan Boland & Edward Hirsch. Large and diverse, and especially good on 20th century experiments.
The Oxford Book of Sonnets, ed. John Fuller. This is smaller and was economically constrained to include fewer 20th century sonnets, but otherwise manages a greater variety. It's also only general anthology I've met that acknowledges the role of women poets of the late 18th century in the revival of the English sonnet, even if the selection of their poems is still thin.
Complete cycles: the best sonnet cycle in English is Sidney's Astrophel and Stella (original spelling). The next-best Elizabethan cycle would be Drayton's Idea; two good Victorian cycles are D.G. Rossetti's The House of Life and C. Rossetti's "Monna Innominata." For contemporary cycles, I'm especially partial to Hacker's Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons; if the form used in Hollander's Powers of Thirteen counts as a sonnet (and this is highly debatable, though it's certainly a sonnet-analog of roughly the same size), I like that as well.
And fwiw, in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, the articles "Sonnet" and "Volta" were especially useful to me this week.
---L.
The Oxford Book of Sonnets, ed. John Fuller. This is smaller and was economically constrained to include fewer 20th century sonnets, but otherwise manages a greater variety. It's also only general anthology I've met that acknowledges the role of women poets of the late 18th century in the revival of the English sonnet, even if the selection of their poems is still thin.
Complete cycles: the best sonnet cycle in English is Sidney's Astrophel and Stella (original spelling). The next-best Elizabethan cycle would be Drayton's Idea; two good Victorian cycles are D.G. Rossetti's The House of Life and C. Rossetti's "Monna Innominata." For contemporary cycles, I'm especially partial to Hacker's Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons; if the form used in Hollander's Powers of Thirteen counts as a sonnet (and this is highly debatable, though it's certainly a sonnet-analog of roughly the same size), I like that as well.
And fwiw, in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, the articles "Sonnet" and "Volta" were especially useful to me this week.
---L.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-30 03:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-30 04:02 pm (UTC)A&S gains a little something in Elizabethan orthography, even if it likely isn't (given the manuscript history and publishing practice) what Sidney actually wrote down.
---L.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-10 01:22 am (UTC)Regardless of whether I get there, having this grounding makes me empowered to go a bit wild with what the many forms of the form might enable. Thank you for the gift of these.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-12 04:39 pm (UTC)