The Romantic Sonnet Revival: Opening the Sonnet’s Crypt Mark Raymond* University of Connecticut – Stamford Abstract Discussions of the sonnet tradition often claim that the sonnet is ‘the most popular, enduring, and widely used poetic form in English.’At first glance, the Romantic period in English seems to bear out these claims fully. Keats and Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake – the six, standard male authors of the Romantic-period canon – all wrote sonnets of some type, and undeniably the form achieved extraordinary popularity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, after its Elizabethan heyday, the sonnet in English had languished as a neglected and decidedly unfashionable form. Before the rise of Romanticism, the sonnet form in the 18th century appeared to be dead, a defunct and antiquated genre. Romanticism resurrected the sonnet and in doing so invented our notion of its widespread favor and timeless appeal. The sonnet, even a Shakespeare sonnet, only becomes a preeminent poetic genre in the age of Wordsworth and Keats, who wrote some of the most familiar sonnets in British literature. More accurately, however, we should credit the sonnet’s revival to an age of Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson and Anna Seward; poets, notably women poets, who, lying now at the margins of the male-dominated Romantic canon, were essentially responsible for engaging and recuperating the moribund sonnet tradition in English. The question is repeatedly asked: Why did Romantic poets choose to revive such an outmoded form? A recent surge in critical attention to the Romantic sonnet, as part of Romanticist criticism’s larger project of reclaiming texts and authors (especially women authors) long neglected and excluded by the standard canon, explores how the compact and demanding form of the sonnet could open up a space outside of the dominant literary authority in which poetic voices, excluded by gender or class, could appropriate for themselves the legitimacy of a cultural tradition that had long been closed. In opening the sonnet’s 18th-century crypt, Romanticism translates the abject relics of a dead poetic structure into a revitalized poetic space in which natural, spontaneous sentiment and diction could find expression. I Two sets of questions arise when one starts to think about the revival of the sonnet in the Romantic period. One line of inquiry involves a basic question that finds itself re-phrased time and again in discussions of the Romantic sonnet: why was the form, so quaint and taxing – and, after its Elizabethan © 2007 The Author Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 721–736, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00454.x
The Romantic Sonnet Revival: Opening the Sonnet’s Crypt
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The Romantic Sonnet Revival: Opening the Sonnet's CryptMark Raymond* University of Connecticut – Stamford
Abstract
Discussions of the sonnet tradition often claim that the sonnet is ‘the most popular, enduring, and widely used poetic form in English.’ At first glance, the Romantic period in English seems to bear out these claims fully. Keats and Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake – the six, standard male authors of the Romantic-period canon – all wrote sonnets of some type, and undeniably the form achieved extraordinary popularity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, after its Elizabethan heyday, the sonnet in English had languished as a neglected and decidedly unfashionable form. Before the rise of Romanticism, the sonnet form in the 18th century appeared to be dead, a defunct and antiquated genre. Romanticism resurrected the sonnet and in doing so invented our notion of its widespread favor and timeless appeal. The sonnet, even a Shakespeare sonnet, only becomes a preeminent poetic genre in the age of Wordsworth and Keats, who wrote some of the most familiar sonnets in British literature. More accurately, however, we should credit the sonnet’s revival to an age of Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson and Anna Seward; poets, notably women poets, who, lying now at the margins of the male-dominated Romantic canon, were essentially responsible for engaging and recuperating the moribund sonnet tradition in English. The question is repeatedly asked: Why did Romantic poets choose to revive such an outmoded form? A recent surge in critical attention to the Romantic sonnet, as part of Romanticist criticism’s larger project of reclaiming texts and authors (especially women authors) long neglected and excluded by the standard canon, explores how the compact and demanding form of the sonnet could open up a space outside of the dominant literary authority in which poetic voices, excluded by gender or class, could appropriate for themselves the legitimacy of a cultural tradition that had long been closed. In opening the sonnet’s 18th-century crypt, Romanticism translates the abject relics of a dead poetic structure into a revitalized poetic space in which natural, spontaneous sentiment and diction could find expression.
I
Two sets of questions arise when one starts to think about the revival of the sonnet in the Romantic period. One line of inquiry involves a basic question that finds itself re-phrased time and again in discussions of the Romantic sonnet: why was the form, so quaint and taxing – and, after its Elizabethan © 2007 The Author Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 721–736, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00454.x
heyday, seen by most to have been in steady decline – revived. As David Fairer recently puts it:‘Why did the Romantic poets find the confined space of the sonnet so congenial?’ (‘Sonnet’ 292). Twenty years earlier, in the mid-1980s, Spencer Hall urged instructors to ask their students ‘Why should the sonnet, as a poetic form, appeal to the Romantics?’ (70). Around the same time, Stuart Curran’s Poetic Form and British Romanticism directed attention to the very question that Hall had posed, and Curran’s explanation set the terms by which the Romantic sonnet has come to be approached: the sonnet’s ‘rebirth coincides with the rise of a definable woman’s literary movement and with the beginnings of Romanticism’ (30). Spencer Hall’s earlier question is now refined and reframed. Following Curran’s focus on the contribution of women poets in Romanticism’s formative years, Daniel Robinson and Paula Feldman’s anthology A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival strongly emphasizes women writers in its choice of texts, and the editors’ ‘Introduction’ argues explicitly that the reasons ‘Why . . . these poets [chose] an essentially outmoded form’ must be seen as a ‘deliberate’ attempt to create an opening in the English literary tradition, an act almost of ‘self-canonization’ (10).
Next to this series of questions I would like to pose a second, corollary concern: why has there been, since the 1990s, this steady emergence of scholarly work concerned with, as Daniel Robinson frames it,‘re-establishing the sonnet as a Romantic form’ (349)? The Romantic revival of the sonnet has its parallel in a contemporary revitalization of critical interest in the form, with attention centering on Romanticism’s role in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century re-establishment of the sonnet as a prime poetic vehicle. Key essays by Robinson, Frederick Burwick, and Brent Raycroft, following Curran, all re-assess the sonnet’s reappearance at the end of eighteenth century in the context of gender and authority, and the sonnet figures prominently in a range of recent books dealing with aspects of genre in the Romantic period – in Brennan O’Donnell’s The Passion of Meter and Susan Wolfson’s Formal Changes, as well as in studies focusing specifically on the sonnet: Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor’s A Moment’s Monument and Joseph Phelan’s The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet. In 2002, the journal European Romantic Review published a special issue devoted to the Romantic-period sonnet, and its collection of essays effectively samples much of the current research trends in the field. The poetry of Wordsworth remains a touchstone, but more often than not the focus is on the work of less well-known women writers, especially Charlotte Smith and her Elegiac Sonnets. Seen as a space for establishing one’s poetic voice and for writing within a social and aesthetic context that counters the dominant traditions of cultural authority, the sonnet is used critically to recover the period’s debates about the function of gender and class in self-expression. At the same time, the subject provides a newer generation of critics an array of texts, authors and topics that counter the dominant modes of critical thought inherited from the work of previous criticism. The Romantic-period and the Romanticist revival of the sonnet
722 . The Romantic Sonnet Revival
© 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 721–736, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00454.x Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
both effect the assertion of new voices in the name of a reclamation of an older and neglected tradition.
Recent critical attention to the sonnet revival characteristically views it as a Romanticist concern. For example, between the first and second editions of Blackwell’s Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, edited by David Fairer and Christine Gerrard, a number of late eighteenth-century poets, Charlotte Smith,William Lisle Bowles, Anna Seward, Mary Robinson, and Helen Maria Williams, were dropped, with a comment that such writers are ‘well served by Romantic period and anthologies’ (xxiii). All of these poets are noted for their writing of sonnets. As the re-structuring of this anthology suggests, the sonnet has become a Romantic topic. Paula R. Backscheider’s recent study Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry, with its chapter on Smith and the sonnet revival, is an exception to this Romanticist focus. Backscheider places the sonnet revival within the entire eighteenth-century context of how women poets manipulated the choice of genre in negotiating literary history, and her work points to how the historicizing of Romantic texts and authors within the scope of eighteenth-century studies is an area of extreme importance for understanding the rebirth of the sonnet form.
In understanding the revival of attention to the Romantic-period sonnet, several issues coalesce to help us frame our inquiry. Intriguingly, much of what has compelled a reappraisal of the Romantic-period sonnet relates to questions and approaches that effectively challenge many of the ideals about the sonnet tradition that were themselves established by the form’s Romantic revival. The notion of the sonnet’s endurance, its broad appeal and prominent status, its sense of perfection as a mode for subjective expression – all are countered by the actual history of the form that Romanticism took up and modified. Critical recovery of the historicity of the sonnet re-establishes the contentions that belong to the sonnet’s rebirth, when new types of authorship and readership put the conditions of poetic genres and dictions under stress – in particular, the work associated with what Curran formulated as a ‘definable woman’s literary movement’, but linked also to the confluence of Romanticism and the late-eighteenth century culture of Sensibility collectively.
The renewal of critical interest in the Romantic-era sonnet may be placed, then, within Romantic Studies’ larger project of reclaiming authors (especially women authors) long-neglected and excluded by the standard canon of major (and male) poetic figures, as well as being seen as part of a broader shift toward more historically and contextually minded approaches – away from the more exclusively rhetorically based methodologies associated with the close readings of the New Criticism and of Structuralism and its Deconstructionist aftermath. This is not to say that analyses of sonnets do not figure prominently within these pre-Historicist approaches to literature. From the works of Cleanth Brooks to Paul de Man, many sonnets, and in particular sonnets by Wordsworth, have been read with powerful acumen,
© 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 721–736, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00454.x Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
The Romantic Sonnet Revival . 723
and close readings of individual sonnets often appear at the center of key documents establishing the tenets of various theoretical methods – consider the exemplary structuralist reading of Baudelaire’s sonnet ‘Le Chats’ by Roman Jakobson and Claude Levi-Strauss or the significant use of Milton’s sonnets by Stanley Fish in developing his case for a reader-response criticism. What is new, however, in Romanticism’s return to the sonnet is a shift away from attending to the text as an exemplary case and towards a consideration of the sonnet within history and as a document of history, an aperture through which the Romantic period’s own cultural, social, and aesthetic concerns can be perceived.
Marking the sonnet historically not only resists much of the sonnet’s claim to timeless achievement, it also returns us to the very reasons why the sonnet was neglected for those long Augustan decades before Romanticism’s rise. Arguably, the sonnet was a poetic antique, if not dead to literature, before writers of the Romantic period took it up and restored both its reputation and its life. Asking the very question ‘why did Romanticism revive the sonnet?’ exposes a paradox at the crux of the sonnet’s reclamation: Romantic studies had opened the sonnet’s crypt, where its Elizabethan relics had lain long in the dust, but the tradition it revitalized elided the sonnet’s death, its historicity and its temporality, in a way that made the genre seem always deathless and permanent, beyond the touch of time. This suppression of the sonnet’s historical disrepute set the stage for a tradition that fostered an understanding of the sonnet, and of the poetic text as such, as somehow transcendent, autonomous, and standing apart. The Romanticist return to the elided historicism of the sonnet’s Romantic revival, its re-opening of the sonnet’s crypt, recovers, in a sense, the historically dependent terms of the paradox of the form’s initiatory gesture, its founding trope upon the incongruity of timeliness and timelessness, whose tradition lies as much in the work of critical thought as it does in the production of poetry.
II
And if no peece of Chronicle wee prove, We’ll build in Sonnets pretty roomes; As well a well wrought urne becomes The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombes[.] (lines 31–4)
When Cleanth Brooks, in his essay on ‘The Language of Paradox’, analyzes these lines from Donne’s ‘Canonization’ – and appropriates from them the title for his influential work of close reading, The Well Wrought Urn – he glosses Donne’s implicit equation of sonnet to urn as a way towards understanding the atemporal, self-contained essence of how successful poetry works:
[Donne’s] lovers are willing to forego the ponderous and stately chronicle and to accept the trifling and insubstantial ‘sonnet’ instead; but then if the urn be
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© 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 721–736, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00454.x Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
well wrought, it provides a finer memorial for one’s ashes than does the pompous and grotesque monument. (14)
The urn, as Brooks reiterates, is the poem, and if, according to Brooks, anything is to arise out of the cinders of temporal and historical (and scholarly) ‘facts’, it is somehow by means of accepting ‘the paradox of the imagination’, which is the language of poetry (21). Tellingly, it is with examples from two sonnets by Wordsworth that Brooks opens his essay, arguing how even the poet’s famous insistence on plain, natural, and spontaneous diction nonetheless gives way to a fundamental poetic situation based on paradox (4). In making his claims for poetic language, Brooks makes ready use of the sonnet and of the idea of the sonnet, and his readings still, after nearly sixty years, offer important insights; yet he really has little to say about the sonnet form itself, apart from, on Donne’s cue, letting it stand in for all poetry, or for all poetry finely wrought. Can we say that there is something about the ‘trifling and insubstantial’ sonnet as such, in its history and its tradition, which makes it paradoxically a ‘finer memorial’ for poetic concerns?
Recent work on the sonnet seems to suggest that, yes, attention to the form’s tradition does reveal a history of paradox, specifically grounded in the sonnet’s ‘scanty plot’, that writers have utilized to convey certain anxieties (universally poetic ones involving love and death, or concerns more topical and local). If the language of poetry is the language of paradox, it can be argued that the sonnet, above all other poetic forms, cultivates a situation of paradox, thriving on the inherent contradictions entailed by a text whose brevity and compaction are belied by a tradition that sees, as one of its characteristic tropes, the sonnet’s ‘powerful rhyme’, however insubstantial it be, long outliving ‘the gilded monuments / [o]f princes’ (Shakespeare, ‘Sonnet 55’ lines 1 –2). Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, for example, seems to be echoing Brooks when she identifies the sonnet’s empowering paradox as the ‘disjunction between the experiential moment and the aesthetic moment’ (19) – the sonnet’s deep-seated conflict between the ‘insubstantial’ and the ‘powerful’. David Fairer speaks to ‘the irony at the heart of the form’ (again, latching onto a key term of the old New Critical idiom), hazarding that ‘constraints of length and rhyme scheme might free poets from wider distractions and allow them to focus their energies’ (‘Sonnet’ 292).
Other contradictions, disconnects and ironies might be found: Giorgio Agamben’s comment that poetry ‘lives’ through the ‘tension and difference’ between ‘sound and sense’ is especially applicable to the sonnet (109). What separates prose from verse, he argues, is the ‘possibility of enjambment’, which he sees as the ‘non-coincidence’ between the ‘prose sense’ of the semantic sphere and the phonetic formalities of meter and rhyme (109–10).1
The tension between sound and sense is perhaps more at stake in the sonnet than in any other poetic form, and Brooks’s attention to Wordsworth’s collapsing of the distinctions between the dictions of poetry and prose lays bares once again the situation of paradox at the sonnet’s heart. © 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 721–736, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00454.x Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
The Romantic Sonnet Revival . 725
The sonnet tradition is founded on tensions like these, yet one major disjunction in the way we understand the tradition involves a tension whose importance Brooks (and the New Criticism as a whole) worked hard to reduce: the sonnet’s relation to its own temporal moment is fraught with contradictions, and much of what might seem inconsequential in light of art’s and the imagination’s seeming transcendence of the touch of time – the historical, the personal, all the trifles of the prose of life, besmeared with temporality – remain essential to comprehending how and why the sonnet tradition has succeeded so well for so long that it can and often does represent the work of poetry as a whole.
Discussions of the sonnet tradition often stress the persistent popular acclaim of the familiar fourteen-line poem. Since its invention in the early thirteenth century (in the Sicilian court of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II), ‘almost every notable poet’ in Western literature can be said to have ‘engaged’ the sonnet-writing tradition in some way (Levin xxxix). Introduced into English in the Tudor period, the sonnet quickly became fashionable, and thereafter ‘found consistent favor’, as a typical guide to poetry asserts (Bergman and Epstein 245). The sonnet has been called ‘the most popular, enduring, and widely used poetic form in English’ (Bender and Squier 1), and the poem’s appeal looks as if it were universal, attracting poets and readers alike in a way that greatly surpasses the much narrower interest in, say, the elegy or the ode. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, for instance, carry the reputation of being far and wide the most favored and timelessly perfect love poems in the language, and they routinely ‘outsell’ his plays (Edmondson and Wells 144; Hecht 1). As the Cole Porter song notes, a ‘Shakespeare sonnet’ is at ‘the top’ of a select list of cultural superlatives – right up there with Mickey Mouse, next to Keats, Shelley, and ‘Ovaltine’.2
At first glance, the Romantic period in English seems to bear out these claims fully. Keats and Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Blake – the six, standard male authors of the Romantic-period canon – all wrote sonnets of some type, and undeniably the form achieved ‘extraordinary popularity’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Fairer 292). On closer inspection, however, the evidence from the Romantic period calls into question the unequivocal terms of the sonnet’s abiding allure. The uses to which Romantic-era writers put the sonnet, the ways in which the form was appropriated, presented, and received, do not so much simply concur with the claims for the sonnet’s enduring esteem but rather demarcate and circumscribe them, exposing limits and resistances that mark what is actually the sonnet’s more mixed and inconsistent record in literary history.
The sonnet, it turns out, has in English literature not always found ‘consistent favor’ – in fact, before the rise of Romanticism, the sonnet had languished as a neglected and decidedly unfashionable form. For about a hundred years, from the Restoration period through the first two thirds of the eighteenth century, the sonnet had, to all intents and purposes, completely disappeared. Few sonnets were read, fewer were being written,
726 . The Romantic Sonnet Revival
© 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 721–736, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00454.x Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
and the word ‘sonnet’ itself had become an opprobrious term, a label for bad writing in a defunct style. The sonnet was dead. If the sonnet now enjoys seemingly universal popularity and prevalence it owes the bulk of its current aura of durability to the form’s Romantic-period revival. Romanticism resurrected the sonnet and in doing so invented our notion of the sonnet’s widespread favor, its timeless poetic regard. The sonnet, even a Shakespeare sonnet, only becomes a top-flight brand in the age of Shelley and Keats – or rather, more accurately, in the age of Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, and Anna Seward, poets, notably women poets, who, lying now at the margins of the male-dominated Romantic canon, were essentially responsible for engaging and recuperating the moribund sonnet tradition in English.
If the more generalized guides to poetic forms tend to elide irregularities and exceptions in their assessments of the sonnet’s enduring popularity, one reason might be found in the structure and practice of the sonnet itself: the form’s own tendency to monumentalize and immortalize a singular turn of thought, the crystallization of an event timelessly evoked. As Dante Gabriel Rossetti would put it in the mid-nineteenth century, the sonnet is ‘a moment’s monument’ (127), and this key turn-of-phrase nicely puts a positive spin on much of the ambivalence and equivocation associated with the fortunes of the sonnet-writing tradition as it enters and passes through the Romantic period. Aspects of the sonnet’s strict formal attributes, along with the tradition’s own rich (yet conventional) inventory of topoi and tropes, conspire to put pressure on the contradictions inherent in…
Abstract
Discussions of the sonnet tradition often claim that the sonnet is ‘the most popular, enduring, and widely used poetic form in English.’ At first glance, the Romantic period in English seems to bear out these claims fully. Keats and Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake – the six, standard male authors of the Romantic-period canon – all wrote sonnets of some type, and undeniably the form achieved extraordinary popularity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, after its Elizabethan heyday, the sonnet in English had languished as a neglected and decidedly unfashionable form. Before the rise of Romanticism, the sonnet form in the 18th century appeared to be dead, a defunct and antiquated genre. Romanticism resurrected the sonnet and in doing so invented our notion of its widespread favor and timeless appeal. The sonnet, even a Shakespeare sonnet, only becomes a preeminent poetic genre in the age of Wordsworth and Keats, who wrote some of the most familiar sonnets in British literature. More accurately, however, we should credit the sonnet’s revival to an age of Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson and Anna Seward; poets, notably women poets, who, lying now at the margins of the male-dominated Romantic canon, were essentially responsible for engaging and recuperating the moribund sonnet tradition in English. The question is repeatedly asked: Why did Romantic poets choose to revive such an outmoded form? A recent surge in critical attention to the Romantic sonnet, as part of Romanticist criticism’s larger project of reclaiming texts and authors (especially women authors) long neglected and excluded by the standard canon, explores how the compact and demanding form of the sonnet could open up a space outside of the dominant literary authority in which poetic voices, excluded by gender or class, could appropriate for themselves the legitimacy of a cultural tradition that had long been closed. In opening the sonnet’s 18th-century crypt, Romanticism translates the abject relics of a dead poetic structure into a revitalized poetic space in which natural, spontaneous sentiment and diction could find expression.
I
Two sets of questions arise when one starts to think about the revival of the sonnet in the Romantic period. One line of inquiry involves a basic question that finds itself re-phrased time and again in discussions of the Romantic sonnet: why was the form, so quaint and taxing – and, after its Elizabethan © 2007 The Author Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 721–736, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00454.x
heyday, seen by most to have been in steady decline – revived. As David Fairer recently puts it:‘Why did the Romantic poets find the confined space of the sonnet so congenial?’ (‘Sonnet’ 292). Twenty years earlier, in the mid-1980s, Spencer Hall urged instructors to ask their students ‘Why should the sonnet, as a poetic form, appeal to the Romantics?’ (70). Around the same time, Stuart Curran’s Poetic Form and British Romanticism directed attention to the very question that Hall had posed, and Curran’s explanation set the terms by which the Romantic sonnet has come to be approached: the sonnet’s ‘rebirth coincides with the rise of a definable woman’s literary movement and with the beginnings of Romanticism’ (30). Spencer Hall’s earlier question is now refined and reframed. Following Curran’s focus on the contribution of women poets in Romanticism’s formative years, Daniel Robinson and Paula Feldman’s anthology A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival strongly emphasizes women writers in its choice of texts, and the editors’ ‘Introduction’ argues explicitly that the reasons ‘Why . . . these poets [chose] an essentially outmoded form’ must be seen as a ‘deliberate’ attempt to create an opening in the English literary tradition, an act almost of ‘self-canonization’ (10).
Next to this series of questions I would like to pose a second, corollary concern: why has there been, since the 1990s, this steady emergence of scholarly work concerned with, as Daniel Robinson frames it,‘re-establishing the sonnet as a Romantic form’ (349)? The Romantic revival of the sonnet has its parallel in a contemporary revitalization of critical interest in the form, with attention centering on Romanticism’s role in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century re-establishment of the sonnet as a prime poetic vehicle. Key essays by Robinson, Frederick Burwick, and Brent Raycroft, following Curran, all re-assess the sonnet’s reappearance at the end of eighteenth century in the context of gender and authority, and the sonnet figures prominently in a range of recent books dealing with aspects of genre in the Romantic period – in Brennan O’Donnell’s The Passion of Meter and Susan Wolfson’s Formal Changes, as well as in studies focusing specifically on the sonnet: Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor’s A Moment’s Monument and Joseph Phelan’s The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet. In 2002, the journal European Romantic Review published a special issue devoted to the Romantic-period sonnet, and its collection of essays effectively samples much of the current research trends in the field. The poetry of Wordsworth remains a touchstone, but more often than not the focus is on the work of less well-known women writers, especially Charlotte Smith and her Elegiac Sonnets. Seen as a space for establishing one’s poetic voice and for writing within a social and aesthetic context that counters the dominant traditions of cultural authority, the sonnet is used critically to recover the period’s debates about the function of gender and class in self-expression. At the same time, the subject provides a newer generation of critics an array of texts, authors and topics that counter the dominant modes of critical thought inherited from the work of previous criticism. The Romantic-period and the Romanticist revival of the sonnet
722 . The Romantic Sonnet Revival
© 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 721–736, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00454.x Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
both effect the assertion of new voices in the name of a reclamation of an older and neglected tradition.
Recent critical attention to the sonnet revival characteristically views it as a Romanticist concern. For example, between the first and second editions of Blackwell’s Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, edited by David Fairer and Christine Gerrard, a number of late eighteenth-century poets, Charlotte Smith,William Lisle Bowles, Anna Seward, Mary Robinson, and Helen Maria Williams, were dropped, with a comment that such writers are ‘well served by Romantic period and anthologies’ (xxiii). All of these poets are noted for their writing of sonnets. As the re-structuring of this anthology suggests, the sonnet has become a Romantic topic. Paula R. Backscheider’s recent study Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry, with its chapter on Smith and the sonnet revival, is an exception to this Romanticist focus. Backscheider places the sonnet revival within the entire eighteenth-century context of how women poets manipulated the choice of genre in negotiating literary history, and her work points to how the historicizing of Romantic texts and authors within the scope of eighteenth-century studies is an area of extreme importance for understanding the rebirth of the sonnet form.
In understanding the revival of attention to the Romantic-period sonnet, several issues coalesce to help us frame our inquiry. Intriguingly, much of what has compelled a reappraisal of the Romantic-period sonnet relates to questions and approaches that effectively challenge many of the ideals about the sonnet tradition that were themselves established by the form’s Romantic revival. The notion of the sonnet’s endurance, its broad appeal and prominent status, its sense of perfection as a mode for subjective expression – all are countered by the actual history of the form that Romanticism took up and modified. Critical recovery of the historicity of the sonnet re-establishes the contentions that belong to the sonnet’s rebirth, when new types of authorship and readership put the conditions of poetic genres and dictions under stress – in particular, the work associated with what Curran formulated as a ‘definable woman’s literary movement’, but linked also to the confluence of Romanticism and the late-eighteenth century culture of Sensibility collectively.
The renewal of critical interest in the Romantic-era sonnet may be placed, then, within Romantic Studies’ larger project of reclaiming authors (especially women authors) long-neglected and excluded by the standard canon of major (and male) poetic figures, as well as being seen as part of a broader shift toward more historically and contextually minded approaches – away from the more exclusively rhetorically based methodologies associated with the close readings of the New Criticism and of Structuralism and its Deconstructionist aftermath. This is not to say that analyses of sonnets do not figure prominently within these pre-Historicist approaches to literature. From the works of Cleanth Brooks to Paul de Man, many sonnets, and in particular sonnets by Wordsworth, have been read with powerful acumen,
© 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 721–736, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00454.x Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
The Romantic Sonnet Revival . 723
and close readings of individual sonnets often appear at the center of key documents establishing the tenets of various theoretical methods – consider the exemplary structuralist reading of Baudelaire’s sonnet ‘Le Chats’ by Roman Jakobson and Claude Levi-Strauss or the significant use of Milton’s sonnets by Stanley Fish in developing his case for a reader-response criticism. What is new, however, in Romanticism’s return to the sonnet is a shift away from attending to the text as an exemplary case and towards a consideration of the sonnet within history and as a document of history, an aperture through which the Romantic period’s own cultural, social, and aesthetic concerns can be perceived.
Marking the sonnet historically not only resists much of the sonnet’s claim to timeless achievement, it also returns us to the very reasons why the sonnet was neglected for those long Augustan decades before Romanticism’s rise. Arguably, the sonnet was a poetic antique, if not dead to literature, before writers of the Romantic period took it up and restored both its reputation and its life. Asking the very question ‘why did Romanticism revive the sonnet?’ exposes a paradox at the crux of the sonnet’s reclamation: Romantic studies had opened the sonnet’s crypt, where its Elizabethan relics had lain long in the dust, but the tradition it revitalized elided the sonnet’s death, its historicity and its temporality, in a way that made the genre seem always deathless and permanent, beyond the touch of time. This suppression of the sonnet’s historical disrepute set the stage for a tradition that fostered an understanding of the sonnet, and of the poetic text as such, as somehow transcendent, autonomous, and standing apart. The Romanticist return to the elided historicism of the sonnet’s Romantic revival, its re-opening of the sonnet’s crypt, recovers, in a sense, the historically dependent terms of the paradox of the form’s initiatory gesture, its founding trope upon the incongruity of timeliness and timelessness, whose tradition lies as much in the work of critical thought as it does in the production of poetry.
II
And if no peece of Chronicle wee prove, We’ll build in Sonnets pretty roomes; As well a well wrought urne becomes The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombes[.] (lines 31–4)
When Cleanth Brooks, in his essay on ‘The Language of Paradox’, analyzes these lines from Donne’s ‘Canonization’ – and appropriates from them the title for his influential work of close reading, The Well Wrought Urn – he glosses Donne’s implicit equation of sonnet to urn as a way towards understanding the atemporal, self-contained essence of how successful poetry works:
[Donne’s] lovers are willing to forego the ponderous and stately chronicle and to accept the trifling and insubstantial ‘sonnet’ instead; but then if the urn be
724 . The Romantic Sonnet Revival
© 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 721–736, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00454.x Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
well wrought, it provides a finer memorial for one’s ashes than does the pompous and grotesque monument. (14)
The urn, as Brooks reiterates, is the poem, and if, according to Brooks, anything is to arise out of the cinders of temporal and historical (and scholarly) ‘facts’, it is somehow by means of accepting ‘the paradox of the imagination’, which is the language of poetry (21). Tellingly, it is with examples from two sonnets by Wordsworth that Brooks opens his essay, arguing how even the poet’s famous insistence on plain, natural, and spontaneous diction nonetheless gives way to a fundamental poetic situation based on paradox (4). In making his claims for poetic language, Brooks makes ready use of the sonnet and of the idea of the sonnet, and his readings still, after nearly sixty years, offer important insights; yet he really has little to say about the sonnet form itself, apart from, on Donne’s cue, letting it stand in for all poetry, or for all poetry finely wrought. Can we say that there is something about the ‘trifling and insubstantial’ sonnet as such, in its history and its tradition, which makes it paradoxically a ‘finer memorial’ for poetic concerns?
Recent work on the sonnet seems to suggest that, yes, attention to the form’s tradition does reveal a history of paradox, specifically grounded in the sonnet’s ‘scanty plot’, that writers have utilized to convey certain anxieties (universally poetic ones involving love and death, or concerns more topical and local). If the language of poetry is the language of paradox, it can be argued that the sonnet, above all other poetic forms, cultivates a situation of paradox, thriving on the inherent contradictions entailed by a text whose brevity and compaction are belied by a tradition that sees, as one of its characteristic tropes, the sonnet’s ‘powerful rhyme’, however insubstantial it be, long outliving ‘the gilded monuments / [o]f princes’ (Shakespeare, ‘Sonnet 55’ lines 1 –2). Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, for example, seems to be echoing Brooks when she identifies the sonnet’s empowering paradox as the ‘disjunction between the experiential moment and the aesthetic moment’ (19) – the sonnet’s deep-seated conflict between the ‘insubstantial’ and the ‘powerful’. David Fairer speaks to ‘the irony at the heart of the form’ (again, latching onto a key term of the old New Critical idiom), hazarding that ‘constraints of length and rhyme scheme might free poets from wider distractions and allow them to focus their energies’ (‘Sonnet’ 292).
Other contradictions, disconnects and ironies might be found: Giorgio Agamben’s comment that poetry ‘lives’ through the ‘tension and difference’ between ‘sound and sense’ is especially applicable to the sonnet (109). What separates prose from verse, he argues, is the ‘possibility of enjambment’, which he sees as the ‘non-coincidence’ between the ‘prose sense’ of the semantic sphere and the phonetic formalities of meter and rhyme (109–10).1
The tension between sound and sense is perhaps more at stake in the sonnet than in any other poetic form, and Brooks’s attention to Wordsworth’s collapsing of the distinctions between the dictions of poetry and prose lays bares once again the situation of paradox at the sonnet’s heart. © 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 721–736, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00454.x Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
The Romantic Sonnet Revival . 725
The sonnet tradition is founded on tensions like these, yet one major disjunction in the way we understand the tradition involves a tension whose importance Brooks (and the New Criticism as a whole) worked hard to reduce: the sonnet’s relation to its own temporal moment is fraught with contradictions, and much of what might seem inconsequential in light of art’s and the imagination’s seeming transcendence of the touch of time – the historical, the personal, all the trifles of the prose of life, besmeared with temporality – remain essential to comprehending how and why the sonnet tradition has succeeded so well for so long that it can and often does represent the work of poetry as a whole.
Discussions of the sonnet tradition often stress the persistent popular acclaim of the familiar fourteen-line poem. Since its invention in the early thirteenth century (in the Sicilian court of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II), ‘almost every notable poet’ in Western literature can be said to have ‘engaged’ the sonnet-writing tradition in some way (Levin xxxix). Introduced into English in the Tudor period, the sonnet quickly became fashionable, and thereafter ‘found consistent favor’, as a typical guide to poetry asserts (Bergman and Epstein 245). The sonnet has been called ‘the most popular, enduring, and widely used poetic form in English’ (Bender and Squier 1), and the poem’s appeal looks as if it were universal, attracting poets and readers alike in a way that greatly surpasses the much narrower interest in, say, the elegy or the ode. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, for instance, carry the reputation of being far and wide the most favored and timelessly perfect love poems in the language, and they routinely ‘outsell’ his plays (Edmondson and Wells 144; Hecht 1). As the Cole Porter song notes, a ‘Shakespeare sonnet’ is at ‘the top’ of a select list of cultural superlatives – right up there with Mickey Mouse, next to Keats, Shelley, and ‘Ovaltine’.2
At first glance, the Romantic period in English seems to bear out these claims fully. Keats and Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Blake – the six, standard male authors of the Romantic-period canon – all wrote sonnets of some type, and undeniably the form achieved ‘extraordinary popularity’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Fairer 292). On closer inspection, however, the evidence from the Romantic period calls into question the unequivocal terms of the sonnet’s abiding allure. The uses to which Romantic-era writers put the sonnet, the ways in which the form was appropriated, presented, and received, do not so much simply concur with the claims for the sonnet’s enduring esteem but rather demarcate and circumscribe them, exposing limits and resistances that mark what is actually the sonnet’s more mixed and inconsistent record in literary history.
The sonnet, it turns out, has in English literature not always found ‘consistent favor’ – in fact, before the rise of Romanticism, the sonnet had languished as a neglected and decidedly unfashionable form. For about a hundred years, from the Restoration period through the first two thirds of the eighteenth century, the sonnet had, to all intents and purposes, completely disappeared. Few sonnets were read, fewer were being written,
726 . The Romantic Sonnet Revival
© 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 721–736, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00454.x Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
and the word ‘sonnet’ itself had become an opprobrious term, a label for bad writing in a defunct style. The sonnet was dead. If the sonnet now enjoys seemingly universal popularity and prevalence it owes the bulk of its current aura of durability to the form’s Romantic-period revival. Romanticism resurrected the sonnet and in doing so invented our notion of the sonnet’s widespread favor, its timeless poetic regard. The sonnet, even a Shakespeare sonnet, only becomes a top-flight brand in the age of Shelley and Keats – or rather, more accurately, in the age of Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, and Anna Seward, poets, notably women poets, who, lying now at the margins of the male-dominated Romantic canon, were essentially responsible for engaging and recuperating the moribund sonnet tradition in English.
If the more generalized guides to poetic forms tend to elide irregularities and exceptions in their assessments of the sonnet’s enduring popularity, one reason might be found in the structure and practice of the sonnet itself: the form’s own tendency to monumentalize and immortalize a singular turn of thought, the crystallization of an event timelessly evoked. As Dante Gabriel Rossetti would put it in the mid-nineteenth century, the sonnet is ‘a moment’s monument’ (127), and this key turn-of-phrase nicely puts a positive spin on much of the ambivalence and equivocation associated with the fortunes of the sonnet-writing tradition as it enters and passes through the Romantic period. Aspects of the sonnet’s strict formal attributes, along with the tradition’s own rich (yet conventional) inventory of topoi and tropes, conspire to put pressure on the contradictions inherent in…
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