Oxford Book of Sonnets

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.