Volume 49, Number 14 · September 26, 2002
You Can't Keep a Good Sonnet Down
By Charles Simic
American Sonnets
by Gerald Stern
Norton, 69 pp., $22.00
Swan Electric
by April Bernard
Norton, 88 pp., $22.00
A Short History of the Shadow
by Charles Wright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 79 pp., $20.00
No poem can be more delightful or more idiotic than a sonnet. For every memorable one, thousands of bad ones—and I'm being charitable in my estimate—have been written over the centuries. Some years ago I recall hearing of a professor who had composed a long sonnet cycle on the subject of Shakespeare's sonnets. It made me laugh but didn't really surprise me. Sonnets more than any other poems depend on precedent. Anyone writing one most probably has a sonnet he has admired in the back of his mind. At their most successful, they have an uncanny way of saying clever and serious things without sacrificing brevity. Nevertheless, with the ascendancy of free verse in the last hundred years and the modernist hope to make poems unlike any that came before, the sonnet appeared doomed and in danger of becoming extinct like some rare species of songbird. Happily, as a couple of recent anthologies and these three new collections of poetry show, the form is thriving. In fact, it is recovering some of its old vigor.
Review, 3839 words
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