The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet

200 Pages·2005·0.756 MB·English

by  Joseph Phelan (auth.)

The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet
OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR:
Phelan: CLOUGH: SELECTED POEMS
The Nineteenth-Century
Sonnet
Joseph Phelan
© Joseph Patrick Phelan 2005
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2005 978-1-4039-3804-6
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ISBN 978-1-349-51913-2 ISBN 978-0-230-51262-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230512627
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Phelan, J. P. (Joseph P.), 1963–
The nineteenth-century sonnet / Joseph Phelan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Sonnets, English–History and criticism. 2. English poetry–19th century–
History and criticism. I. Title.
PR509.S7P48 2005
821(cid:2).042(cid:2)09–dc22 2005051250
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05
For Giovanna
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Contents
Introduction 1
1 The Wordsworthian Sonnet Revival: Poems in 9
Two Volumes(1807)
2 ‘Transcripts of the private heart’: The Sonnet and 34
Autobiography
3 The Political Sonnet 61
4 The Devotional Sonnet 85
5 ‘Illegal Attachments’: The Amatory Sonnet Sequence 107
6 ‘Thought’s pure diamond’: The Sonnet at the End of 134
the Century
Notes 155
Bibliography 179
Index 187
vii
Introduction
One of the pastimes of the Rossetti siblings was a game called ‘bouts-
rimés’, in which they would compete with one another to compose
sonnets from a set of rhymes. Many of the resulting poems were of
fairly low quality, as William Michael Rossetti admits in mitigation
of one of his own efforts which found its way into the Pre-Raphaelite
magazine The Germ: ‘This sonnet was one of my bouts-rimés perform-
ances. I ought to have been more chary than I was of introducing into
our seriously-intended magazine such hap-hazard things as bouts-rimés
poems: one reason for so doing was that we were often at a loss for
something to fill a spare page.’1Sometimes, however, the spontaneity
of the exercise produced a freshness and immediacy absent from more
studied performances:
The spring is come again not as at first
For then it was my spring; & now a brood
Of bitter memories haunt me, & my mood
Is much changed from the time when I was nursed
In the still country. Oh! my heart could burst
Thinking upon the long ago: the crude
Hopes all unrealised; the flowers that strewed
My path, now changed to painful thorns & curst.
And though I know the kingcups are as fine
As they were then, my spirit cannot soar
As it did once: when shadows of a wood
Or thinking of a blossom that soon should
Unfold & fill the air with scent, would pour
Peace on my brow now marked with many a line.
1
2 The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet
This is one of a group of ‘bouts-rimés’ sonnets preserved amongst
Christina Rossetti’s papers, all composed (according to her own anno-
tation) in between five and nine minutes.2The result in this case has,
partly due to the sparing use of punctuation, something of the appear-
ance of a piece of ‘automatic writing’, an impression reinforced by its
reworking of some of Christina Rossetti’s most characteristic themes
and motifs. Her poetry is full of the kind of repetition with variation
introduced in the opening lines and developed throughout the poem;
spring returns, but a different spring which merely reminds the poet of
all that she has lost in her life. There is a very characteristic suggestion
of Christ-like suffering in the Miltonic-sounding ‘painful thorns &
curst’, without the answering moment of consolation which appears in
almost all of her published poetry. And the last line, with its reference
to the speaker’s own physical appearance, may contain an implicit
equation between the ‘lines’ on her brow and the ‘lines’ inscribed on
the page – a possibly unconscious suggestion of a connection between
her vocation as a poet and her unfulfilled personal life.3
The ‘bout-rimés’ sonnet encapsulates many of the complexities and
contradictions of the nineteenth-century use of the sonnet form. It is
both spontaneous and rule-governed, both personal and conventional.
It is a throwaway form of little intrinsic value, written to fill up a spare
page, and at the same time the most intrinsically valuable of poetic
utterances. Wordsworth lamented the amount of time he had wasted
writing sonnets, but also characterised the sonnet as the ‘key’ to Shake-
speare’s ‘heart’.4 It is an ephemeral and occasional form, and at the
same time a ‘monument’ which will immortalise both poet and
subject. These contradictions reflect the sonnet’s ambiguous position
within nineteenth-century poetics. As a conventional and arbitrary
form it runs counter to the prevailing belief in the necessity of an
organic connection between form and content, leading to a series of
attempts to ‘organicise’ the form and demonstrate its indissoluble con-
nection with certain states of mind and feeling. Again, as a form
proverbial for its insincerity it seems to conflict with the very strong
post-romantic emphasis on sincerity as a criterion of poetic value, and
the result of this conflict is a sustained endeavour to position the
sonnet as the most sincere and personal of poetic forms, sometimes
(asin the case of Keble) by virtue of its very conventionality.5The story
of the nineteenth-century sonnet is the story of the exploration of
these tensions and contradictions. Some poets, of course, use the form
inertly, imitating the gestures and techniques of others; but the most
innovative and interesting sonnet writers of the century – Words-