Volume 48, Number 7 · April 26, 2001
Tough Cookie
By Brad Leithauser
The Oxford Book of Sonnets
edited by John Fuller
Oxford University Press, 362 pp., $22.00
W.H. Auden believed that the sonnet's profound appeal has a physiological basis, that its fourteen-line structure subdivides itself into proportions the brain naturally finds beguiling. It's as plausible an explanation as any for the unparalleled success of this modest prosodic construct conceived in Sicily in the thirteenth century. 'Little song' or 'little sound' is what the word connotes in the original Italian, and yet it's a song or sound whose reverberations, eight hundred years later, continue to bear a fresh and haunting music.
Review, 3377 words
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