Our fourteen days of sonnets comes to an end with Kavanagh’s great disciple and successor, Seamus Heaney. A lover and master of the form, Heaney produced a number of sonnet sequences at key points in his

Our exploration of the world of the sonnet began in twentieth century Ireland, and it’s to Ireland we return as we draw to a close. W. B. Yeats (1865 – 1939), probably the greatest Irish poet ever and

Reviewing the poems we’ve read so far, it’s clear enough that they all share features that we can identify and describe as sonnet-like: fourteen lines long, following a regular rhyme-scheme (though the

It’s more than a hundred and fifty years since our last sonneteer wrote. The form was not beloved of the 18th Century’s poets, who strove for a neoclassical grandeur that demanded large-scale forms,

And suddenly I panic: the tenth sonnet, and we’re running out of time, and the great poems clamour at the gates. What about us, say the rest of Shakespeare and Milton, and their Elizabethan and Jacobean

I’ve always felt that poetry should be at home – no, embroiled – in the world. It’s not that a poem is a journalistic act, or a piece of propaganda, or anything other than a poem. But poems, like their

The sonnet-a-day challenge continues with an encounter with John Milton - puritan, revolutionary, father of the political poem in English, and possibly my favourite among our poets so far. As Shakespeare

We're halfway through, and we turn to Shakespeare again, Sonnet 129. We talked yesterday about how the Elizabethan poet was a player with (or of?) conventions, givens. That’s how the culture worked, a

We saw with Spenser how poets often gather sonnets into groups, suites or sequences. There are probably a number of reasons – the short form drawn from song is an almost perfect fit for the single thought,

Son of a weaver and cloth-merchant, Edmund Spenser was born in London in 1552 and died there in 1599. As a colonial administrator in Ireland during the Nine Years’ War he witnessed, and indeed defended

The golden age... It’s not long after Wyatt (and others) have naturalised the sonnet in English that it becomes the mark of a cultured gentleman to be able to compose a well-turned fourteener. I think

So! This is a day late! (Though if you followed the link in the last post, the Robert Lowell was a twofer!) We go right back to the beginning now, to the poet who more than anyone - and possibly literally

For the second in the sonnet series, we’ll stick with the late twentieth century but cross the Atlantic, where Boston poet Robert Lowell (1917 - 1977) evolved a powerful blend of the autobiographical,

In the flow of a conversation about poetry with a visual artist friend (the kind of conversation I don't have that often these days) she confessed that she didn't know what on earth I meant by a sonnet,