The Sonnet Beyond the Renaissance
The Sonnet Is Alive and Well
Poets still play the sonnet game, finding in this old form a new way to explore the present. See, for example, Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s “Transgender Heroic.” One of my favorite novels is Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, composed entirely in iambic tetrameter sonnets, about recent college grads trying to negotiate life in San Francisco circa 1980. Even e.e. cummings, a poet known for his flamboyant defiance of literary conventions (like capitalization and punctuation), wrote sonnets!
Every Spring, the OSU English Department’s very own Lord Denney’s Players runs a sonnet contest for undergraduates. See what your fellow-students have done in past years (here are the 2020 winners) and consider submitting your own composition.
Exercise for Recitation
To gear you up for the LDP competition, your discussion assignment for this week is to try your hand at a sonnet. Start with a theme you’d like to explore, then figure out whether it would be better expressed in a Shakespearean or Spenserian sonnet (what would be the advantages or challenges of each approach?). You can write about anything. Sonneteering is hard, as you’ll find. Be ready to share your sonnets, along with your observations about the challenges you faced planning and writing them, with your classmates.
Iambic tetrameter is a meter in poetry. It refers to a line consisting of four iambic feet. The word "tetrameter" simply means that there are four feet in the line; iambic tetrameter is a line comprising four iambs. (source: Wikipedia)