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The Sonnet: An Anthology : A Comprehensive Selection of British and American Sonnets from the Renaissance to the Present
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 23, 2010
I read this book in tandem with A Moment's Monument: The Development of the Sonnet. Both are massive anthologies of sonnets, a pure punishment of a cover-to-cover read, but I managed it. The second edition of the Bender & Squier contains almost 400 pages of sonnets and is probably intended more as a dip in than a plow through, but I plowed anyway.
The White & Rosen (A Moment's Monument) is about half that length, and brevity gives it a tick mark in the virtues column, but the editors introduce many of the poems with pedantic notes, and I wound up preferring the longer book on the whole. Also the second edition of Bender & Squier was updated in 1987, so it contains many twentieth-century examples not available in White & Rosen, which was published in 1972. The books balance each other out in the crotchets department, with White & Rosen excessively fond of anything excessively religious and putting Edwin Arlington Robinson's best efforts on a par with Shakespeare; and Bender & Squier championing Coleridge (no, not that Coleridge but his drunken son--EIGHT sonnets enlisted as evidence) and omitting "The Windhover" altogether.
But over all The Bender & Squier is the objective one. It really is trying to be "comprehensive," as the subtitle claims, and the result is a book that's proudly full of bad poetry:
"'Everything about that man is good except his poetry.' Time has not brought this judgment into question."
"More notable for their abundance than for their quality."
"Despite the assertions of his Autobiography (1834), he was not much of a poet and still less of a genius."
These quotes (and many others like them) come from the brief introductions to the poets. They are supported not with one sonnet but with several. That's an editorial decision I don't wholly understand.
As for the gem-hunting (anyone who reads books like these is doing so, at least in part, in the hopes of coming across a terrific poem inexplicably obscured by an inch or so of history's dust), the pickings were slim. I was familiar with most of the great poems. Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, and Hopkins go off like alarm clocks against the backdrop of general gray sonnetry. Donne and Wordsworth make a little ruckus too. Shelley, Yeats, Frost, Rupert Brooke, Archibald MacLeish, and Wilfred Owen each have one great, famous sonnet to their names, and these hold up marvelously in the context.
Most of the unfamiliar ones I liked were humor poems. Sir John Davies (1569-1626) wrote parodies of Renaissance sonnets in the thick of the Renaissance sonnet craze. They sound like they were written hundreds of years later. The editors call Mark Alexander Boyd's "Fra Bank to Bank. . ." "the finest sonnet in Scots." No argument here. Two philosophically funny gems appear only in the briefer White & Rosen--James Leigh Hunt's "A Fish Answers" and Samuel Butler's "A Prayer."
That leaves only Siegfried Sassoon's "Dreamers" (the sestet is perfection) and George Barker's "To My Mother" (marred by its punning close, in my book) as the two poems my college professors have no excuse for not getting to me. Maybe they tried and I wasn't listening.
Hayden Carruth's sonnet called "Late Sonnet" also caught my eye in that it expresses my personal aesthetic in matters of poetic form exactly. It's really not much of a sonnet though.
The White & Rosen (A Moment's Monument) is about half that length, and brevity gives it a tick mark in the virtues column, but the editors introduce many of the poems with pedantic notes, and I wound up preferring the longer book on the whole. Also the second edition of Bender & Squier was updated in 1987, so it contains many twentieth-century examples not available in White & Rosen, which was published in 1972. The books balance each other out in the crotchets department, with White & Rosen excessively fond of anything excessively religious and putting Edwin Arlington Robinson's best efforts on a par with Shakespeare; and Bender & Squier championing Coleridge (no, not that Coleridge but his drunken son--EIGHT sonnets enlisted as evidence) and omitting "The Windhover" altogether.
But over all The Bender & Squier is the objective one. It really is trying to be "comprehensive," as the subtitle claims, and the result is a book that's proudly full of bad poetry:
"'Everything about that man is good except his poetry.' Time has not brought this judgment into question."
"More notable for their abundance than for their quality."
"Despite the assertions of his Autobiography (1834), he was not much of a poet and still less of a genius."
These quotes (and many others like them) come from the brief introductions to the poets. They are supported not with one sonnet but with several. That's an editorial decision I don't wholly understand.
As for the gem-hunting (anyone who reads books like these is doing so, at least in part, in the hopes of coming across a terrific poem inexplicably obscured by an inch or so of history's dust), the pickings were slim. I was familiar with most of the great poems. Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, and Hopkins go off like alarm clocks against the backdrop of general gray sonnetry. Donne and Wordsworth make a little ruckus too. Shelley, Yeats, Frost, Rupert Brooke, Archibald MacLeish, and Wilfred Owen each have one great, famous sonnet to their names, and these hold up marvelously in the context.
Most of the unfamiliar ones I liked were humor poems. Sir John Davies (1569-1626) wrote parodies of Renaissance sonnets in the thick of the Renaissance sonnet craze. They sound like they were written hundreds of years later. The editors call Mark Alexander Boyd's "Fra Bank to Bank. . ." "the finest sonnet in Scots." No argument here. Two philosophically funny gems appear only in the briefer White & Rosen--James Leigh Hunt's "A Fish Answers" and Samuel Butler's "A Prayer."
That leaves only Siegfried Sassoon's "Dreamers" (the sestet is perfection) and George Barker's "To My Mother" (marred by its punning close, in my book) as the two poems my college professors have no excuse for not getting to me. Maybe they tried and I wasn't listening.
Hayden Carruth's sonnet called "Late Sonnet" also caught my eye in that it expresses my personal aesthetic in matters of poetic form exactly. It's really not much of a sonnet though.
February 9, 2022
An exquisite volume. A truly wonderful collection of sonnets from the Elizabethans to the mid-20th century. This is a collection in which my pencil markings note every second poem, and which will keep me warm for many years to come. I am looking forward to Phyllis Levin's Penguin Book of the Sonnet, but until then I have not found another volume of sonnets that is so engaging and all-encompassing.
August 21, 2021
The 1987 paperback edition is an excellent pocket sized collection of sonnets, though not truly “comprehensive” as claimed.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews