The Oxford Book of Sonnets (Oxford Books of Verse) - Softcover

3.93

46 ratings by Goodreads

9780192803894: The Oxford Book of Sonnets (Oxford Books of Verse)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0192803891 ISBN 13: 9780192803894

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2003

The sonnet is the best-loved and most versatile of poetic forms, alive and well after over 450 years in English. It is still an automatic choice for the expression of intense but controlled feelings on both private and public subjects. Although it is most often associated with love poems, it is also used for devotional, philosophical, and comic purposes, and this anthology demonstrates the full range of its exhilarating possibilities.

Beginning with Wyatt and ending in the present day, The Oxford Book of Sonnets juxtaposes old favourites with the less familiar: Shakespeare's marriage of true minds rubs shoulders with John Davies of Hereford's ABC of love, Keats's stout Cortez with Darley's Manrique. Women poets who revived the sonnet in the late eighteenth century are restored to prominence, and there are examples of the sonnet sequence as well as more unusual experimentation with form such as Sylvester's quadruple acrostic sonnets to his patron and Leigh Hunt's iterating sonnet. Modern poets as diverse as Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy, and Simon Armitage show that there is no better way to dramatize experience than to write a sonnet.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

John Fuller, a fellow of Magdalen College, is a well known anthologiser, novelist and poet, with good trade/media profile. He has writen five novels, 13 volumes of poetry, and editied several anthologies including the Chatto Book of Love Poetry.

From Booklist:

The word new is missing from the title of Oxford's latest anthology, and perhaps this is the venerable publisher's first survey of the sonnet in English. It seems a companionable reader rather than a teaching text, which is only right, in view of the 14-line poetic form's reputation for intimacy and personality. Fuller doesn't neglect the sonnet's historical variations in mode and prosodic practice. The early sonnet's amorousness; the political and religious intents of the sonnets of Milton and those he inspired, most notably Wordsworth; the satire of the numerically rare eighteenth-century sonnet; the celebration of nature in the sonnets of the Romantic period; the Victorians' propensity for compact sonnet sequences; and Hopkins' radical experimentation with the form--all these and their subsequent influences are evident in Fuller's selection. Indisputable masterpieces appear plentifully, but Fuller's determination to present a large number of distinguished practitioners assures that there are also many superb poems by virtual unknowns. And Fuller's introduction is a sharp-witted miracle of concise comprehensiveness. Ray Olson
Copyright � American Library Association. All rights reserved

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.