The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1928) and
William Empson, Seven Types of
Ambiguity (1930), ch. 2; the development
of a sustained metaphoric argument, in
Winifred Nowottny, The Language Poets
Use (1962).
It is clear that sonnets are often
technical ‘exercises’, but it by no means
follows that they are therefore insincere.
In exploring the medium, poets are
exploring their own capacities to feel and
think: Sidney’s declaration Astrophel and
Stella, c.1583), ‘I am no pick-purse of
another’s wit’ has an ironic edge, but is
justified in the emotional thoroughness of
his expropriations. Conventionality can
be misunderstood and overstressed; it is
perfectly possible to write insincere
sonnets – to be facile, self-deceived,
inexperienced or gross (Ben Jonson, ‘An
Elegie’):
Such songsters there are store of;
witness he
That chanced the lace, laid on a
smock, to see,
And straightway spent a sonnet
The fragile idealism of the convention
invited parody and self-parody (as in
Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost), but
proved inseparable from its ability to
endure through time and change. Donne’s
famous lines form ‘The Canonisation’
catch both the permanence and the
fragility:
We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
As well a well wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs
In the sonnet the individual poet may find
a fullness and spaciousness of meaning
that could not be attained in isolation: ‘The
true father or shaping spirit of the poem is
the form of the poem itself, and this form
is a manifestation of the spirit of poetry,
the “onlie begetter” of Shakespeare’s
Sound 223
sonnets who was not Shakespeare
himself, much less that depressing ghost
Mr W. H., but Shakespeare’s subject, the
master-mistress of his passion’ (Northrop
Frye, Anatomy of criticism, 1957). The
uncompromising technical discipline
of the sonnet combined with the logical
and emotional intensity available has
preserved its fascination for many poets
right down to the present day.
See J. W. Lever, The Elizabethan Love
Sonnet (1956); Hallett Smith, Elizabethan
Poetry (1952); Antony Easthope, Poetry
as Discourse (1983).
LS
Sound According to Mallarmé,
versification (and therefore poetry) exists
whenever a writer attempts STYLE, giving
equal prominence to sonority and to
clarity of linguistic performance: ‘Toutes
les fois qu’il y a effort au style il y a
versification’. But sound is a primary
aspect of poetry rather than of prose, and
Mallarmé’s dictum that the aesthetic
impulse, the ‘effort au style’, renders
prose and poetry indistinguishable visual
vehicles of versification, fails to convince:
prose is a most unsatisfactory medium for
writers concerned with sound (and for
some poets, poetic writing is little better).
The writer of prose can only control
sound and attempt to indicate subtleties of
sound, by means of punctuation.
A reviewer of essays by Robert
Creeley, a poet obsessed with sound, was
moved to comment, ‘One is puzzled by the
exotic syntax’. The writer of poetry cannot
only produce exotic syntax, but can also
counterpoint punctuation spatially with
line endings; the pause at the end of the
line offers an additional means of scoring
sound to the comma, the semicolon, etc.
Spatial ‘punctuation’, and typographical
variation – innovated by Mallarmé in
his ‘Un Coup de Des . . .’ (1897), and