Sonnet Tradition Research Articles

THE PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN POET IN LADY MARY WROTH’S PAMPHILIA TO AMPHILANTUS

Lady Mary Wroth is considered to be one of the most prominent women writers of the Early Modern Period. She comes from the Sidney family, the members of which are well-known with their noteworthy literary accomplishments. Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus has a significant place among the sonnet sequences and early modern women’s poetry as it is “the first sonnet sequence to be composed by an Englishwomen” (Roberts, 1982, p. 43). The Petrarchan tradition with its determined roles of a male poet and an idealized lady, along with its blazons employed to express the consequences of unfulfilled love and desire can hardy accommodate a woman who comes up with such an unaccustomed role. This article, therefore, aims at a study of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, as a sonnet sequence to see how a woman poet manages to employ the sonnet tradition in her own way. How Wroth as a woman poet accommodated herself and her persona to the poetic tradition of the time will be the main point of argumentation. It is in this respect that, the focus will be on Pamphilia and how she is represented with a new role. She is depicted as a woman with a voice, talking about her experience and the destructive outcomes of grief, quite often questioning the nature of love. Pamphilia appears not as the silent object of some other poet’s work, but writing her own poems, metaphorically redefining her place in the literary production. Furthermore, Wroth’s choice of genre, how she employed and revised it, the role she assigned to the female speaker, the major themes, along with her ideas on writing as a woman poet will be further elaborated on.

Female Roles Revisited in Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

Lady Mary Wroth (1587-1653) was an English noblewoman and one of the significant literary figures of the English Renaissance. She is renowned for her works, namely, Love’s Victory (c. 1620), The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621), and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621). In Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Lady Mary Wroth challenges the patriarchal ideology that excludes women both as sonneteers and lovers who are able to express their love in Petrarchan sonnet tradition. The dominant tradition centralizes the male lovers and marginalizes women as idealized silent beloveds. Thus, it transforms female characters into docile objects to be loved by their male lovers. In order to confront the misogynistic treatment of these concepts of female author and lover in the sonnet tradition, Lady Mary Wroth writes within and against the sonnet tradition and manipulates the masculine genre to insert the female voice into it. First, she assumes submissive roles the dominant tradition appropriates. She negotiates these roles and accordingly manipulates them to her own advantage. Her contestation and later manipulation of these traditional roles create opportunities to resist the oppression she faces by rewriting the disempowering tradition. Hence, she subverts the limited roles of female characters in the dynamics of sonnet tradition by employing specific strategies. In this regard, this article analyzes Lady Mary Wroth’s strategies of subversion of the conventional roles for female characters in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus and explores Wroth’s poetic innovations that challenge the gendered concept of the male poet in the sonnet tradition.

Shakespeare and sonnet form

This essay considers some of the uses to which Shakespeare put the literary form of the sonnet along with its component parts – the iambic pentameter line, the quatrain, the sestet, and the rhyming couplet – both in his plays and in independent poems. It offers a fresh appraisal of the sonnets by Shakespeare published by Thomas Thorpe in 1609, with emphasis on those printed in the earlier part of the volume, often referred to as ‘the young man sonnets’. The article also discusses Richard Barnfield's homoerotic verse and position in relation to the sonnet tradition and to Shakespeare's place in it.

Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition by Hollis Robbins

Reviewed by: Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition by Hollis Robbins Peter Howarth Hollis Robbins. Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2020. 264 pp. $32.95. In 2018, Hollis Robbins went to hear poet Natasha Trethewey give a prestigious lecture. Trethewey spoke about her mixed-race family, the "racial determinism" of her Southern upbringing, and her fondness for the sonnet, a "received European form" (2). Preempting the inevitable criticism that such forms are endemically white, privileged and male, Trethewey quoted Audre Lorde's warning that the master's tools could be never used to dismantle the master's house, but then added that in her own writing life, "I have turned to such forms to contain the subject-matter necessary to challenge the master narrative." After the applause, Robbins asked a question: "How many sonnets have to be written before someone says she received the form from a Black poet?" (2). Trethewey was silent, and then acknowledged that for her, the sonnet had indeed come from Gwendolyn Brooks, not from Europe. Forms of Contention argues that this has been true for a good while. The sonnet is no longer a form borrowed from Europe or white America but is instead one Black writers now own themselves, given the superb sonnets and sequences written by Brooks, Margaret Walker, Robert Hayden, Terrance Hayes, Marilyn Nelson and Trethewey herself. It also maintains that a distinct Black sonnet-writing tradition has been there all along but has been lost by the nineteenth-century newspaper, the anthologies of the twentieth century, and the late modernism of the Black Arts movement. The result is that a sonnet like Claude McKay's "If We Must Die" is never considered "representative" of influential Black poetry the way Langston Hughes is, and the great number of Black sonnets in newspapers and anthologies are overlooked as inauthentic and genteel. "Too many ancestors have been forgotten," Robbins writes, "too much nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry was banished from the Black poetry canon in the 1960s because it was too 'traditional'" (2). Forms of Contention aims to correct this act of selective memory on both counts. It wants to recover the Black sonneteers from the eighteenth-century onward, and to show that their work forms an authentic tradition of influences, inheritances and rewritings, a multigenerational chain of sonnets. It succeeds admirably at the first task, but to find a "distinct genre" (118) of the African American sonnet is harder work, historically. This is not because Black poets have not brilliantly wrested the form into shapes that express distinctly African American situations and struggles. Robert Hayden's boundary-bursting sonnet "To Frederick Douglass" or Gwendolyn Brooks's "Gay Chaps" sequence about the US Navy officers penned below decks and their fiancées hemmed in at home are among the best sonnets ever written, without doubt. But the act of adapting the sonnet's pleading to new causes is also part of its tradition. Petrarch made the sonnet famous with his addresses of sexual desire and thwarted ambition, but those appeals were soon transformed into wrestlings with God, or demands for political honor to be restored, or from Milton onward, for both. Wordsworth and Southey took over Milton's enjambed lines and used them to thunder against slavery itself. In that sense, African American poets have been fully traditional from the start, Phillis Wheatley's 1768 appeal to King George: Great God, direct, and guard him from on high,And from his head let every evil fly!And may each clime with equal gladness seeA monarch's smile can set his subjects free! [End Page 242] Scholars debate the degree to which her blessing of the King for repealing the hugely unpopular Stamp Act (a tax paying for British troops in the colonies) contains a plea for other kinds of freedom. But given Wheatley's captive status, to write a sonnet to God and the sovereign at all gave the genre new vigor by giving it a new range of causes to plead. The trickier task that Forms of Contention has set itself, though, is to find a self-aware...

Arden Shakespeare'in On Shakespeare's Sonnets Eseri'nde Shakespeare'in Şiirlerinin Sonraki Hayatlarına Genel Bakış

The Arden Shakespeare published a poetry collection titled On Shakespeare’s Sonnets in 2016 in which several contemporary poets have responded to one Shakespearean sonnet of their choice. Most of the themes in the sonnets such as the transience of earthly life, the endurance of love, and the procreation of beauty are retained in their modern versions. However, recent approaches to these themes do not follow the sonnet tradition due to the poets’ adherence to modern topics, as seen in the poems of Douglas Dunn, Jackie Kay, and Andrew Motion, and an emphasis on realism instead of the romanticised exaggerations in the sonnet genre, as observed in the poems by Alan Jenkins, Carol Ann Duffy, and Elaine Feinstein. In some of these poems, love for the beloved, for instance, is treated alternatively as a temporary feeling that cannot endure the passing of time. The platonic ideal of love for the beloved is reconstituted with a mother’s compassion for her son. The idea of the procreation of beauty is replaced with an adoration of the regenerative power of nature. In some others, the influence of the contemporary context is evident with indications of urban images such as traffic, technology, and shopping malls. Through such examples, this paper aims to discuss some of the rewritten versions of Shakespeare’s sonnets to explore the idea that recontextualisation and subversion of the source text are central to the practice of Shakespearean adaptation despite the initial tenet of the production of this particular collection, which is to celebrate Shakespeare’s literary heritage.

From being ‘object’ to being ‘subject’: the rewriting of Petrarch's sonnet tradition from a female perspective in the sonnets of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti

Viktorya Dönemi İngiltere’de toplumsal cinsiyet rollerinin en baskın olduğu dönemlerin başında gelir. Katı ahlak kurallarının egemen olduğu bu dönemde, kadın toplum tarafından belirlenmiş basmakalıp rollere sıkıştırılmıştır. Öyle ki, kendini ailesine adamış iyi bir eş, anne ve ev hanımı olması beklenen kadın yalnızca duygularıyla var olurken akıl, mantık ve entelektüellik yalnızca erkeklere atfedilen özelliklerdir. Dolayısıyla, şair olmak kadınların yapabileceği bir iş değildir, kadınlar ancak şiirin ‘nesne’si olabilir çünkü ataerkil toplumda erkekten her açıdan aşağı görülen kadın, erkeğe karşı yalnızca güzelliği ile üstünlük sağlayabilir. Bu bağlamda, “saray aşkı” geleneği çerçevesinde âşık olduğu kadının güzelliğini, sadakatini, erdemini, ahlakını yücelten, mükemmelliğini idealize eden bir aşığın saplantılı ama karşılıksız aşkını konu edinen Petrarca’nın sone geleneği, yalnızca erkeklere atfedilen ve kadını arzu edilen bir nesne olarak ele alan en bilinen şiir türlerinden biridir. Bu çalışma, Viktorya Dönemi İngilteresi’nin önde gelen iki kadın sone yazarı Elizabeth Barrett Browning ve Christina Rossetti’nin “Sonnets from the Portuguese” ve “Monna Innominata” adlı sone dizilerinde erkek egemen Petrarca sone geleneğinin kadın bakış açısıyla yeniden yazılmasını ele almaktadır. Bu çerçevede, çalışma Browning ve Rossetti'nin yazdıkları soneler ile kadınları şiire yalnızca güzellikleriyle ilham veren birer ‘nesne’ olmaktan çıkarıp, şiirin hisseden ve düşünen “öznesi” yaparak hem toplumda hem de edebi eserlerde nesneleştirilen, edilgenleştirilen ve sessiz kılınan kadınların sesi olduklarını ileri sürmektedir.

Form, Time, and the “First English Sonnet”

ABSTRACT The earliest known English poem rhyming ababcdcdefefgg appears within John Metham's 1448/9 romance Amoryus and Cleopes. Scholarship cannot, however, easily claim Metham's lyric as the first English sonnet: contrary to past suggestions, available historical and manuscript evidence indicates that he did not intentionally create a sonnet, but rather composed in the form accidentally. This inset lyric's rhyme scheme therefore represents, possibly uniquely in English, sonnet form without the sonnet tradition. Despite this isolation, however, attentive reading shows that the lyric achieves certain effects very like those produced by later English sonnets. The common features underpinning these effects even in a text not knowingly written as a sonnet might help criticism isolate factors that make up form's essence or quiddity.

Michael Field: Decadent Moderns. Edited by Sarah Parker and Ana Parejo Vadillo. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019. Pp. v+289.

<i>Michael Field: Decadent Moderns</i>. Edited by Sarah Parker and Ana Parejo Vadillo. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019. Pp. v+289.

Three Mothers, Two Eves: Female Virtuosity and Outrage in the American Sonnet

Three Mothers, Two Eves: Female Virtuosity and Outrage in the American Sonnet Anna Maria Hong This essay discusses the sonnet as a vehicle for female virtuosity and expression of attendant outrage in various registers, examining sonnets by two 20th-century maestros of form, Gwendolyn Brooks and Sylvia Plath, along with the very contemporary collaborative sonnets of Simone Muench and Jackie K. White. I approach this writing as a practitioner, noting the patterns that I perceive in these poets’ invocations of the sonnet, as someone who knows the form from long engagement with its musical and political possibilities. When one is working within the sonnet, one can feel a direct engagement with other constraints and constructs—for example, of gender, race, and class, as embodied by the form’s notably male, white, and wealthy European tradition. As Gwendolyn Brooks says at the end of “The Womanhood,” which concludes her ground-breaking second collection Annie Allen: The toys are all grotesqueAnd not for lovely hands; are dangerous,Serrate in open and artful places. Rise.Let us combine. There are no magics or elvesOr timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost, mustWizard a track through our own screaming weed. Published in 1949, Annie Allen was the first book by any Black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize, and Brooks, of course, earned many other firsts in her illustrious career. “The Womanhood” ends with these lines, which cap a series of sonnets, ballads, and other poems, beginning [End Page 202] with the sonnet sequence “the children of the poor,” in which a young woman contemplates her life, her writing, the destructions of World War II on the home front, and the lives and futures of her children who are not just her biological progeny, but whole populations facing constant threat, “adjudged the leastwise of the land” and in need of the poet’s empowering “brisk contour,” which she delivers in this series, speaking as both a young mother and as an African American writer and activist. I want to examine the fourth sonnet, which confronts the dilemmas of her position head on, beginning with the directive to “First fight. Then fiddle,” and which extends the metaphor of music in the context of battle, as the speaker dramatizes the challenges of speaking and being heard. The poem ends: Carry hateIn front of you and harmony behind.Be deaf to music and to beauty blind.Win war. Rise bloody, maybe not too lateFor having first to civilize a spaceWherein to play your violin with grace. This poem is remarkable to me in both its candor—the overt call to fighting, war, and hate—and in its slyness. Even as the speaker privileges the fight in this ars poetica, recognizing the need “for having first to civilize a space” that is hostile to her and her peoples’ very presence, carrying “hate / in front of you and harmony behind,” she mellifluously sears her points home in precise iambic pentameter and a perfectly turned Petrarchan rhyme scheme. Notably, only a few feet deviate from the iambs: the alliterative spondees of “first fight” and “win war” add sonic emphasis to those calls to action. The trochee of “muzzle” speaks to a desire to inhibit “the music that they wrote,” which I interpret as a reference to the sonnet tradition itself, which must be invoked in a dazzling manner akin to magic: “Bewitch, bewilder.” By the end of the poem, the fiddle has become a violin, an embodiment of high European culture and tradition, [End Page 203] much like the sonnet, which has been deployed as an instrument of change with “feathery sorcery.” Lines 5–7 ironically instruct the poet/musician to use the form/ instrument gently so as not to disturb racialized and gendered expectations of delicacy and acquiescence—“Devote / The bow to silks and honey”—a sentiment that is immediately undercut by the delightfully understated turn of “Be remote / A while from malice and from murdering,” as if the speaker is calmly drinking tea while taking a break from a crime spree and not just being distant, as the phrase before the line break would indicate. Then, literally without missing...

Helene Johnson’s Barbaric Songs Choked

Helene Johnson’s Barbaric Songs Choked Eleanor Wakefield (bio) Helene Johnson, born in 1906, was among the younger poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Today, Helene Johnson suffers from relative neglect, which impoverishes our understanding of both the Harlem Renaissance and the possibilities of the sonnet form. Though her free verse poems are more often anthologized, her sonnets offer complex, sometimes deliberately ambiguous portrayals of Black women’s interiority. In particular, two of her sonnets, “A Missionary Brings a Young Native to America” (1928) and “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem” (1927), have a shared contrast between sonnet and “song” that reveals one way that Johnson exploits the nuance of the form to simultaneously embody and critique the American sonnet tradition. This paper asks: what does the sonnet form contribute to the understanding of Black figures in America who are not (yet) American, and how does the form embody and also create this vision of America in contrast to an African or otherwise exoticized home? The poems use different rhyme schemes and depict different types of Black characters in America, raising different questions about assimilation, among other things. That said, the shared theme of song within the sonnet structure provides a way of imagining the creation of a place in America (or perhaps America making a type of figure out of the poetic object). The sonnet invites contrasts and tensions, in fact emphasizing them formally, and Johnson uses that effect to distance speaker from observation and form from what the poem represents; the form is aware of its history and its work in creating poetic meaning. In “A Missionary Brings a Young Native to America,” a 1928 sonnet first published in Harlem, the contrast between speaker and subject of the poem (here in [End Page 230] the object position) is put in religious terms, with America represented by a missionary who has brought a “young native” to this continent. In “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem,” a 1927 sonnet that appeared in both Caroling Dusk and Ebony and Topaz, the contrast between America and the man’s “home” (Africa or perhaps the Caribbean) is visual and aural, in how the man looks and sounds walking down the street. These poetic subjects, which appear in the object rather than the subject position of the poem, are not allowed to speak in the sonnet form, which, here, is an American form, representing the tenets of a culture they do not yet fit into. Both poems mention the “songs” of the characters. Their songs differentiate them from the people they are around, but the poetic form does not give voice to those songs. Though the sonnet is a “little song” in its meaning, it is now more associated with its constructedness, its lack of spontaneity, whereas a “song-like” poem tends to connote a feeling of spontaneity or unconstructedness. Of course, sonnet writers and readers know that the “constraint” of the form need not be “limiting,” but the association of the form with control, with tradition, and with labor marks it as distinct from a poem or song that seeks to appear spontaneous (or many lyric poems that critics historically dismissed as song-like, thereby also dismissing the skill required to write them, as was the case for many female poets historically). Thus “song,” in these poems and more broadly, connotes something closer to “natural” (or even primitive, revealed by the adjective “barbaric” in “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem”) in that it may be unlearned or from a folk tradition, and something not yet worked into a particular shape like the sonnet has been. This distance between the song and the sonnet features prominently in both of these poems, emphasizing a distance between the speaker/observer and the observed, immigrant character whose songs are mentioned but not represented on the page. The physical presence of the Black body combines with a deep, emotional ambivalence about Christianity in “A Missionary Brings a Young Native to America” (1928), which imagines one woman’s [End Page 231] experience of the mythologized journey to “salvation” in America. The poem ends: And as the moon grew large and whiteAbove the roof, afraid that she would scream...

“A Thing Apart”: Sonnet Poetics and Radical Politics in Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows

In this paper, I read Claude McKay’s partaking in the English sonnet tradition in Harlem Shadows as being a fundamental part of—and not, as many commentators have suggested, counter to—the poet’s and book’s radical politics. Upon contextualizing my readings alongside critics including Houston A. Baker, Jr., Kamau Brathwaite, and Winston James, I perform close readings of McKay’s poems “Subway Wind” and “Outcast.” I specifically analyze how these poems imagine climatic ‘currents’ through images and metaphors of racially marked colonial spaces, which the poems, I suggest, also poetically perform through the actualization of the sonnet form as discursive currents redirected toward liberatory politics.

Five Ways of Investigating Adnominals in Czech Sonnets of the 19th and 20th Centuries

Abstract The paper focuses on analysing the use of adnominals in the selected fifteen sonnet authors of the 19th- and 20th-century Czech literature. The poets have been selected so as to represent the main literary schools of the period, the main criterion of their ranking being their dates of birth. The investigation treats both general trends (changing numbers of adnominals in various eras, the measure of ornamentality in particular authors), and specific, Czech-based issues (premodification and postmodification, attributes and genitives). The goal of the paper is threefold: first, there is an endeavour to determine some principles of the development of the sonnet tradition in the Czech literature; second, some micro-analyses of the poets are provided, including contrastive views of various writing tactics employed by them; and third, one way of measuring ornamentality has been sketched, as the tool may be of help in unearthing stylistic preferences of different authors. All counts and figures are accompanied with interpretations which may be further enriched by literary scholars.

МЕТАФОРА «ЕДЫ-ЛЮБВИ» В «СОНЕТАХ» ШЕКСПИРА

The article is devoted to the issue of the development of the “food-love” metaphor in Elizabethan sonnetists’ and Shakespeare’s works. The metaphor origin is traced in folk culture and Anacreontic poetry, and its transformation in sonnet cycles by Ph. Sidney, G. Constable, E. Spencer, R. Barnfield and W. Shakespeare is also considered. It has been ascertained that the development of the metaphor in Anacreontic nature, refined and playful, is peculiar to the Elizabethan sonnet tradition, while Shakespeare’s understanding is closer to common people and even partly Rabelaisian. This indicates that Shakespeare’s “Sonnets” deviate significantly from the traditional Elizabethan concepts.

“Breaking the Silent Sabbath of the Grave”: Charlotte Smith's Sonnet XLIV and Her Place in Literary History

ABSTRACTThis essay re-assesses the much-discussed place of Charlotte Smith (1784–1806) in literary history, through her most widely read and anthologized Sonnet XLIV “Written in the Churchyard at Middleton in Sussex” (1789). Smith is often credited with reviving the sonnet in the late eighteenth century, yet when she first published her Elegiac Sonnets (1784), the revival was already underway. This essay argues that Smith's engagement with her predecessors and contemporaries needs to be excavated and analyzed in order to understand her role and significance in the sonnet revival. It shows that Smith's negotiations with eighteenth-century sonnet tradition are manifested in Sonnet XLIV and played out upon its churchyard setting. The second part of the essay considers the many responses to Middleton Church in the years following the sonnet's publication. These shed new light on Smith's literary reputation and posthumous fate, as well as the processes underpinning it. The essay thus clarifies Smith's paradoxical “place” both in the sonnet revival and in posterity. It shows how appropriation of place itself was an important way in which aspects of literary tradition and reputation were negotiated and understood in the late eighteenth century, and beyond.

Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writingby Anthony Reed

<i>Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing</i>by Anthony Reed

Radcliffe's Poetic Legacy: Female Confinement in the “Gothic Sonnet”

Radcliffe's sweeping, panoramic scenes of loco-description have often been deemed poetical in style, and previous scholarship has commented on the poetical influences on her prose. But while Radcliffe's novels are often posed as capacious tomes that absorbed the conventions of many other modes of writing, to what extent did her writing influence genres other than the Gothic novel itself? How did Radcliffe's novels and the Gothic tradition impact nineteenth-century poetry? This article traces Gothic themes from novels by Ann Radcliffe, Matthew “Monk” Lewis and Mary Wollstonecraft that came to shape the Romantic and Victorian sonnet tradition. Through close readings of important nineteenth-century metasonnets by William Wordsworth, John Keats and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, it shows how the language of trapped female bodies and spatial confinement was incorporated by poets to create a tradition of “Gothic sonnets”. Such sonnets utilize the imagery of female bondage as an analogy for the formal limitations of the sonnet's 14 lines, rigid rhyme and strict meter.

Lady Rosaline’s Darkness: Linguistic Games and Deep Meanings

The aim of this paper is to show the aesthetic as well as philosophical complexity of the discourse led by Shakespeare in Love’s Labour’s Lost; a comedy that conveys, through a particularly sophisticated and sometimes paradoxical language, deeply “revolutionary” meanings. The process that takes place in the play consists in a double passage, the main symbol of which is the darkness of Lady Rosaline. On the one hand, Shakespeare makes Rosaline’s darkness the rock on which the traditional Petrarchan lyric founders. The falsifying character of the Petrarchan rhetorical language is in fact revealed to be misleading, while the Neo-platonic ideal at the base of the sonnet tradition, chromatically characterized as luminous and white, crashes against the obscure materiality of the lady’s body. On the other hand, the exceptionally complex linguistic game through which Shakespeare ambiguously intertwines light and darkness, expresses the play’s ontological and epistemological discovery. The initial denial of mankind’s “material parts”, associated by Navarre to an “ascetic” kind of knowledge, is followed by the recognition of matter’s profound value and of a new epistemological paradigm, according to which knowledge can be reached only by directly experiencing the darkness of the material world.

Keeping Faith: Translating the Poems of Sarra Copia Sulam

Although Sarra Copia Sulam’s sonnets present various challenges to translators, the opportunity to convey her distinctive voice offers ample compensation. Since translation is an iterative art, the best any translator can achieve is a version of the original, ideally one that combines historically accurate understanding of the era’s context with poetic diction that sounds idiomatic and mellifluous in the target language and target, that is, contemporary, era. Sulam’s sonnets bridge multiple steams of influence—emulation of the magnificent Italian sonnet tradition; echoes of Biblical Hebrew (particularly The Psalms); firm handling of early seventeenth-century poetic trends; and finally distinctive individual talent and style. The English translator must connect these strands while simultaneously conveying the complex autobiographical narratives which prompted and continue to underlay the sonnet content. Her battles with the Italian religious and literary establishment, while exposing her to mortal risk, inspired her best work. Thus, the translator’s chosen phrases and rhythms must also suggest the conscious and unconscious unease of a woman under duress. While her writings often adopt paradigms from the dominant Italian culture and popularized by Christian males, they are enriched by deliberate interweaving of traditional Jewish thought and depiction of the troubled pilgrim as a female Jew, a status which both exposed her to profound exile from Italy’s literary community and enabled her unique contribution to it.

The Romantic Sonnet Tradition and the Strategy in Keats’s Sonnet Writing

The Romantic Sonnet Tradition and the Strategy in Keats’s Sonnet Writing

Laura's Laurels: Christina Rossetti's "Monna Innominata" 1 and 8 and Petrarch's Rime sparse 85 and 1

Laura's Laurels:Christina Rossetti's "Monna Innominata" 1 and 8 and Petrarch's Rime sparse 85 and 1 Mary Moore (bio) Sonnets are full of love, and this my tome Has many sonnets: so here now shall be One sonnet more, a love sonnet, from meTo her whose heart is my heart's quiet home, To my first Love, my Mother, on whose kneeI learnt love-lore that is not troublesome; Whose service is my special dignity.1 The poem quoted above, which opens A Pageant and Other Poems, the 1881 volume in which Christina Rossetti published the sonnet sequence "Monna Innominata," depicts sonnets as "full of love," suggesting plenitude coupled with ease of formal containment, a kind of capacious abundance. The poem also associates the sonnet form with trouble. Since maternal love provides "love-lore that is not troublesome," and since the sonnet form traditionally voices erotic love, troublesome love expressed in sonnets must be erotic.2 The sound of "love-lore" evokes a major source of the sonnet's troublesome "love-lore"—Petrarch's twin loves: poetic laurels and the lady Laura. Associating inherited literary forms, and allusions to them, with ideas common at the time of their origin—with "lore,"3 Christina Rossetti thus preceded contemporary theory on genre and intertextuality. In describing the book's "many sonnets," the dedicatory poem also foreshadows "Monna Innominata's" focus on the sonnet, a focus Rossetti manifests through her use of that poetic form within poems and as structure for the fourteen-sonnet metapoem; through a prose statement alluding to seminal male and female sonneteers—Petrarch, Dante, and Barrett Browning4—and through the subtitle, "A sonnet of sonnets." The subtitle presents Rossetti's sonnets as about sonnets, owned by, and/or born of sonnets, even, as Sharon Bickle notes, as the best of sonnets.5 It also [End Page 485] highlights a material element of "Monna Innominata": the subtitle presents the fourteen sonnets literally as one sonnet, the metapoetic structure William Whitla elucidated.6 Since each poem is preceded by quotations in Italian from Dante and Petrarch, Rossetti literally incorporates and contains the language of these male precursors in her own larger poem, ultimately in her book. Her refusal to print any of the poems separately (Whitla, p. 93) and her sense of sonnets as containers "full of love," construct her poem as the larger, more powerful container, a container of containers. Rossetti thus displays poetic mastery under the sign of female voice through a formal metaphor that involves both containment and magnitude: the outermost "sonnet"—Rossetti's—is of necessity the greatest in size and in power. In light of this ideologically nuanced play with the sonnet form and with the implicit issues of gender embedded in the sonnet tradition, Rossetti's "Monna Innominata" has received much deserved critical attention in the last twenty years, including studies of the influence of Dante and Elizabeth Barrett Browning,7 yet Petrarch's role in the intertextual play has not drawn careful analysis. Those critics who have addressed the Petrarchan allusions have primarily discussed Petrarchism, rather than the referenced poems of Petrarch, and have focused on the epigraphs' lines, rather than closely reading the entire poems to which Rossetti alludes side by side with her own poems—an attention that has, on the other hand, been paid to the verses referenced in the epigraphs from Dante. Knowledge of the family's abiding interest in Dante has eclipsed the possible influence of Petrarch, and the preface describes Petrarch as "as a great tho an inferior bard," but while the allusions from Dante demonstrate a complex intertextual dialog, they derive from Purgatorio not from Vita Nuova, the obvious formal precursor.8 Petrarch, then, the only sonneteer whose sonnets feature in the epigraphs, must carry important allusive power for Rossetti in her sonnet of sonnets. Furthermore, Rossetti's attraction to and her reading of Petrarch's sonnets as ultimately about spiritual struggle, a struggle that "Monna Innominata" also enacts,9 has recently been demonstrated by Michele Martinez. These factors surely justify more nuanced attention to the specific Petrarch poems Rossetti evokes as we read her own related poems. In fact, many...