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This is a book about one of the oldest and most popular forms of poetry, the sonnet, which is a short poem of 14 lines, often used in love poetry. Shakespeare's sonnets are among the best-known examples of the form, but it was used by Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and many other poets, right through to the present. Many women writers have used the sonnet, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Carol Ann Duffy, and it has been widely used in America (by Robert Frost, for instance) and in Ireland (by W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney). The book traces the history of the sonnet from medieval Italy to modern Britain, showing why the sonnet is such an attractive form for writers and explaining how it works in terms of shape and rhyme scheme. It includes a detailed study of many famous poems, including sonnets by Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Auden, and Heaney.
This is a book about one of the oldest and most popular forms of poetry, the sonnet, which is a short poem of 14 lines, often used in love poetry. Shakespeare's sonnets are among the best-known examples of the form, but it was used by Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and many other poets, right through to the present. Many women writers have used the sonnet, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Carol Ann Duffy, and it has been widely used in America (by Robert Frost, for instance) and in Ireland (by W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney). The book traces the history of the sonnet from medieval Italy to modern Britain, showing why the sonnet is such an attractive form for writers and explaining how it works in terms of shape and rhyme scheme. It includes a detailed study of many famous poems, including sonnets by Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Auden, and Heaney.
Introduction
1: The Renaissance Sonnet
2: The Romantic Sonnet
3: The Victorian Sonnet
4: The Irish Sonnet
5: The American Sonnet
6: The Modern Sonnet
Epilogue: The Sonnet and its Travels
Bibliography
No other book offers a comprehensive and detailed study of the sonnet from the Renaissance to the present
Stephen Regan is Professor of English at Durham University, where
he is also Director of the Centre for Poetry and Poetics. He served
as Head of Department at Durham from 2008 to 2011, and was a
Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard University from 2011 to 2012.
His publications include Irish Writing: An Anthology of Irish
Literature in English 1789-1939 (Oxford University Press, 2004) and
an edition of Esther Waters by the Irish novelist, George
Moore (Oxford University Press, 2012). His essays on modern poetry
have appeared in The Cambridge History of English Poetry (2010),
The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry (2008),
and The Oxford
Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (2012). He is co-editor, with
Andrew Motion, of the Penguin Book of Elegy.
"There is no better close reader of the formal effects of sonnet structure, sound, syntax, rhyme, and rhythm. He exfoliates their localised effects with such deft care and artfulness ... Regan manages somehow to hold our attention throughout and focus his interpretive energies so that each sonnet gets its due and reveals its singular qualities. To read The Sonnet is to have the eye trained to see more, even in sonnets of well-worn familiarity. From now on, whenever I teach or write about sonnets, the first question I will ask myself is: what did Regan have to say?" -- Joshua Reid, The Spenser Review
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