Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Contemporary poets and the sonnet
- 2 The sonnet and the lyric mode
- 3 The sonnet, subjectivity and gender
- 4 The English sonnet in manuscript, print and mass media
- 5 European beginnings and transmissions
- 6 Desire, discontent, parody
- 7 Shakespeare’s Sonnets
- 8 Sacred desire, forms of belief
- 9 Survival and change: the sonnet from Milton to the Romantics
- 10 The Romantic sonnet
- 11 The Victorian sonnet
- 12 The modern sonnet
- 13 The contemporary sonnet
- Further reading
- Index
12 - The modern sonnet
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2011
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Contemporary poets and the sonnet
- 2 The sonnet and the lyric mode
- 3 The sonnet, subjectivity and gender
- 4 The English sonnet in manuscript, print and mass media
- 5 European beginnings and transmissions
- 6 Desire, discontent, parody
- 7 Shakespeare’s Sonnets
- 8 Sacred desire, forms of belief
- 9 Survival and change: the sonnet from Milton to the Romantics
- 10 The Romantic sonnet
- 11 The Victorian sonnet
- 12 The modern sonnet
- 13 The contemporary sonnet
- Further reading
- Index
Summary
If the modernists had got their way, this book would have ended right here. To its late Victorian and Georgian enthusiasts, the sonnet epitomized compact lyric perfection, its critical high-water mark probably being Crosland’s assertion in The English Sonnet (1917) that ‘when great poetry is being produced, great sonnets are being produced’. But to the modernists, the sonnet represented the worst of the previous generation; its formal pattern was complicit with production-line thinking, and its polish with the genteel unreality in which an industrialized culture had wished to preserve its art. ‘The sonnet is the devil’, snarled Pound, because it was the modern West’s first mass-produced, ‘habitual’ form, the lyric blueprint for ‘anything not needing a new tune perforce for every new poem’. ‘Perish all sonnets!’, wrote Wallace Stevens to his fiancée, after reading Stedman’s Victorian Anthology. ‘Sonnets have their place … but they can also be found tremendously out of place: in real life where things are quick, unaccountable, responsive.’ Though Eliot’s ‘Reflections on Vers Libre’ (1917) reassured traditionalists that ‘formal rhymed verse will certainly not lose its place’ with the coming of free verse, he added darkly, ‘as for the sonnet I am not so sure’. And for the surrealists, the sonnet was the refuge of poets who could no longer feel poetry’s unconscious, electric charge, as Breton complained in 1933:
All these ‘sonnets’ that still get written, this senile horror of spontaneity, all this rationalistic refinement, these stiff-lipped supervisors, all this incapacity for love, leave me convinced that escape is impossible from this ancient house of correction … Correct, correct yourself, be corrected, polish, tell off, find fault, never plunge blindly into the subjective treasury purely for the temptation to fling here and there on the sand a handful of frothy seaweed and emeralds.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet , pp. 225 - 244Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
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