THE DREAD EAR: The Art of the Sonnet. Edited by STEPHEN BURT and DAVID MIKICS * Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman. Edited by BEN MAZER with an introduction by STEPHEN BURT

Abstract

While Stephen Burt and David Mikics repeatedly demonstrate, both in the introduction to their new anthology and in its critical readings of individual poems, their awareness of the sonnet's cultural history, they also come clean about their unashamed perspectivism. Defending their ‘generous selections from contemporary work’ by noting that there are ‘many more poets at work now in English than ever’, they go on to remark, in parenthesis, that a ‘book like ours, compiled a hundred years hence, would surely give less space than we do to the period from 1960 to 2010, just as we give less space than Victorian editors did to their own era’. The strength of The Art of the Sonnet lies in how it reconciles this culturally relative approach to the canon with many sensitive close readings which delineate, in a readable and energetic style, the specifically formal pleasures of its chosen texts. To conflate a couple of Burt's remarks, we do not finally read Spenser for his ‘Protestant implications, present though they are’, or return to the sonnets of the nineteenth century American poet Frederick Tuckerman (more on him later) simply because, as is ‘standard in Victorian poems’, his work demonstrates ‘horror at nature's indifference – followed, sometimes, by reluctant, secularizing acceptance’. Rather, it is the ‘resources’ with which these poets address such historical experience which is finally the thing about them. Through enumeration of the ways in which poets have used the sonnet, variously mutated, to write about not just Petrarchan love but the often embattled circumstances of their times, The Art of the Sonnet finds a way of talking about the poetic process itself.