The Sonnet

Stephen Regan is Professor of English at Durham University, where he is also Director of the Centre for Poetry and Poetics. He served as Head of Department at Durham from 2008 to 2011, and was a Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard University from 2011 to 2012. His publications include Irish Writing: An Anthology of Irish Literature in English 1789-1939 (Oxford University Press, 2004) and an edition of Esther Waters by the Irish novelist, George Moore (Oxford University Press, 2012). His essays on modern poetry have appeared in The Cambridge History of English Poetry (2010), The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry (2008), and The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (2012). He is co-editor, with Andrew Motion, of the Penguin Book of Elegy.

There is no better close reader of the formal effects of sonnet structure, sound, syntax, rhyme, and rhythm. He exfoliates their localised effects with such deft care and artfulness ... Regan manages somehow to hold our attention throughout and focus his interpretive energies so that each sonnet gets its due and reveals its singular qualities. To read The Sonnet is to have the eye trained to see more, even in sonnets of well-worn familiarity. From now on, whenever I teach or write about sonnets, the first question I will ask myself is: what did Regan have to say?

• Introduction 1: The Renaissance Sonnet 2: The Romantic Sonnet 3: The Victorian Sonnet 4: The Irish Sonnet 5: The American Sonnet 6: The Modern Sonnet Epilogue: The Sonnet and its Travels Bibliography