Customer Reviews

The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology

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I own only two books of sonnets, Hirsch & Boland and Levin's The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English. I do like the commentary in Hirsh & Boland better; Boland's essay "Discovering the Sonnet" is especially wonderful. But for a book to pick up and browse I prefer the Levin. It has much more depth for many of the genre's most accomplished practitioners, e.g. over 30 from Shakespeare vs. ten in Hirsh & Boland. So if you want to learn about sonnets, get H&B. If you want to read them, get Levin. Or better, get both.

If you go by the number of pages devoted to the various incarnations of the sonnet in this anthology, you'd come to the conclusion that the 20th century English language sonnet is the highpoint in the history of the form with some minor attention given to international sonneteers such as Neruda or Rilke. The layout of the book was also problematic as you are given a detailed breakdown of sonnet mechanics at the very end of the volume, if the breakdown was at the start of the anthology I would have a better appreciation for the intent of the poems outside of my normal aesthetics.

If you are interested in a deeper look at the history of the English language sonnets, I'd recommend The Sonnet: A Comprehensive Anthology of British and American Sonnets from the Renaissance to the Present, Edited by Robert M. Bender and Charles L. Squier.

Hirsch and Boland have offered wisdom in their own poems and in their writings on poems ...individually. Their teaming to trace the sonnet's history and to provide a sweet gathering of the little songs is stunning. To dance through the centuries on the music of the form is a joy. I love the commentaries. I love the sonnets.

There has been a revival in the sonnet in English-language poetry in recent years, but you'd never guess that from this book, which tends to give the impression that sonnets written after World War II were essentially a curiosity, something one does once or twice. The Levin anthology is far, far, superior.

I gave this book as a present to a friend after hearing the authors on the NPR's (WBUR) "On Point", my favorite talk show. She really enjoyed it. I had to test it to make sure that I didn't lose her opinion - whatever it is - of my critical acumen. After sampling it for an hour before presenting it, I found the writers to be bright, engaging, and erudite, and just the list of all the sonnets cited to be worth the price of admission. I will be getting my own copy soon.

A long term admirer of the authors, I bought this book when it first appeared, and am glad I did, the commentary alone, for me, anyway, being well worth the price. The idea of placing individual sonnets within the context of the development of the form was ingenious, and will be of enormous help to poetry lovers and aspiring sonneteers. The clever arrangement of this book in part inspired some elements in my own recent anthology, Sonnets for Sinners: Everything One Needs to Know About Illicit Love, in that I arranged the poems to illustrate the emotional journey of illicit love, and also added a facing page of insight into each sonnet (and sonneteer). So then, to these anthologists, Hat's Off!--and Thanks.

The Norton anthology of sonnets includes such great sonnet writers as Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Rita Dove. If you define a sonnet as a 14 line poem written in iambic pentameter with limited foot substitution to reduce monotony and a definite rhyme scheme, we find that no sonnets were written by poets born after 1928; and very few of the poems in the anthology are sonnets. Perhaps the title of the anthology should have been The Making of an Almost Sonnet. On page 370 we find out that the Shakespearean sonnet rhyme scheme is abab cdce efef gg? Out of the 510 pages there were 21 outstanding sonnets. The book is politically correct and totally void of any controversial or brilliant accomplishment that would detract from the current crop of poets, so that it would make a perfect textbook for a freshman English Literature class.