Some (P)Arts of the Sonnet

Every generation seems to need a new rehearsal of the sonnet’s history, a new compendium of exemplars, a new set of two-page commentaries. Our age, it seems, demanded its version and so we have, courtesy of Stephen Burt and David Mikics, The Art of the Sonnet.

Sigh.

I suppose it hurts no one to be reminded, again, of the sonnet’s origins in 13th-century Italy, of its importation into English verse by 16th-century diplomats and noblemen, of its enormous popularity among Elizabethan courtiers, its resurgence among the Romantics, and its position as a favorite occasion for experiment (or rabid resistance to experimentalism) among modern and contemporary poets. And yet another volume that takes us from “Whoso list to hount” through Sidney, Spenser, a couple of the best-known Shakespeares, Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Millay, Frost, and Heaney is as good a way as any for the small and shrinking poetry-buying public to spend their few discretionary dollars (though I'd much rather they bought new volumes by living poets, like this one or this here other one). The mini-essays on the sonnets here are fine. Burt is a prolific and deft book-reviewer and his skill is evident (disclosure: we were colleagues a few years ago). But I’ve never been quite sure of the purpose served by commentaries in volumes like this. If the book is for students, the commentaries perform some of the work students ought to do themselves as they play with the poems. If it’s for scholars, the commentaries add little to ongoing critical conversations (we'll read Roland Greene on post-Petrarchanism, thanks). And if the book is, as I suspect it will be, picked up mostly by the sort of well-off professional who would like to add a little literary knowledge as a mark of Bourdieuian distinction (the audience for recorded lectures on, say, music appreciation or classics in translation), the commentaries will too often stand in for, rather than lead into, the poems themselves (it is, after all, much easier to derive cocktail party tidbits from prose about a poem than from the poem itself).

The contents attempt historical comprehensiveness (not just the big three Renaissance sonneteers, but also Fulke Greville and George Gascoigne, not just the major Romantics but also the eccentric American, Jones Very, etc). Likewise, the later periods (the book tilts toward the recent) show at least an awareness of the desirability of aesthetic diversity (a Ted Berrigan sonnet here, a Tony Lopez sonnet there). But it’s precisely here that I find the book most irritating. Take the 30 sonnets included here published after 1960 (please). Among them appear sonnets by May Swenson, Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott, Tony Harrison, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Amy Clampitt, John Hollander, Rosanna Warren, Rita Dove, and Alison Brackenbury. Sure, these poets offer certain kinds of diversity. Harrison fills the form with political dissatisfaction, Dove with racial consciousness. Lowell is caught amidst his long experiment with the blank verse sonnet as a journalistic form and Bishop halves the lengths of the lines from their usual pentameter. But these, and most of the others here, exemplify one or another version of the familiar form doing familiar things with fairly familiar themes. (By the way, while two of the great recent experimenters with the sonnet – Geoffrey Hill and Paul Muldoon – are present and accounted for, I find myself wishing, in one of those inescapable critical cavils, that they were represented by some of their more searching experiments; “Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings,” say, or “Quoof”).

Here’s the thing. There are more fun and interesting adventures in the sonnet since 1950 than are dreamt of in this book’s philosophy. The form was a favorite among writers on the political Left during the Fifties (not surprising, given the prominence of politics among the oft-treated themes in the form’s history). One might imagine, to give Harrison some company, an example from Walter Lowenfels’s Sonnets of Love and Liberty, or one of the tart, taut 14-line pokes at pop culture published by Eve Merriam. I’ve acknowledged the welcome presence of Berrigan and Lopez, but here, too, they might have been given a bit more sympathetic company in the form of a section from Lopez’s fellow Cambridge-schooler Drew Milne’s "Garden of Tears," say, or from Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets or Alice Notley’s 165 Meeting House Lane. Indeed, the really interesting riches among experimental sonneteers is something this volume would never lead you to suspect. Here’s half a dozen examples off the top of my head, in no particular order: Ken Edwards’s Eight + Six, Adrian Clarke’s 25 Sonnets, Sean Bonney’s Astrophil and Stella, Allen Fisher’s Apocalyptic Sonnets, Edwin Denby’s In Public, In Private, and Geraldine Monk’s “Ghosts.” (You can find some of these, or parts thereof, in The Reality Street Book of Sonnets.) And this is to say nothing of the great Oulipian games with the form; they’d have to be included in translation, but this didn’t stop Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo wandering leglessly in.

And this, I think, is what fuels my crankiness about another Wyatt-to-Walcott slog through the history of the sonnet. There are plenty of anthologies, with and without commentary, in which a student, a scholar, or a would-be sophisticate can find the familiar sonnets included here, from “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” to “Bluebeard,” and the exemplars better than those included here (Frost’s “Design,” for instance, instead of “Mowing”). Which leaves me, once more, wondering just what purpose is served by this partial (in both senses) survey.