ENGL 485-01, Senior Seminar: The Sonnet in Theory and Practice, Spring 2012

Abstract

A critical investigation the sonnet, which has proven to be one of the most durable yet flexible lyric forms in the English language, accommodating a surprisingly wide range of poets and modes. This senior seminar will survey major practitioners of the sonnet, with Shakespeare and his Renaissance peers as central figures, yet stretching back to Petrarch and forward to contemporary Anglophone writers, including a novel written as linked sonnets, Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate. We will explore translation and cultural autonomy; gender and voice; tension between isolated lyric poems and their development in sequences; the dynamics of revisionary dialogues between poets; and more abstract principles about literary form and its evolution. Selected poets will include Wyatt, Surrey, Spenser, Sidney, Wroth, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Smith, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Browning, Meredith, Rosetti, Wharton, Lazarus, Hopkins, Yeats, Moore, Bogan, Frost, Lowell, Bishop, Walcott, Hill, Merrill, Brooks, and Heaney, among many.