The Oxford Book of Sonnets

by John Fuller (Editor)

Alive and well after 450 years in English, the 14-line sonnet is perhaps the best-loved and most versatile of poetic forms. Poets ranging from Shakespeare to Alice Oswald have found it the perfect choice for the expression of intense but controlled feelings. Beginning with Wyatt and ending
in the present day, The Oxford Book of Sonnets is a unique treasury of memorable sonnet reflections on love and life.
In a beautiful one-poem-per-page design, Shakespeare's marriage of true minds rubs shoulders with John Davies of Herefrod's the late ABC of love, Keats' stout Cortez with Darley's Manrique. Women poets who revived the sonnet in eighteenth century are restored to prominence, and modern poets as
diverse as Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy, and Simon Armitage are well represented. After an expository introduction that traces the sonnet in English from its appearance in the Tudor Court of the sixteenth century through its various historical reinterpretations and eras of popularity, 328 sonnets
are arranged in order of the birth date of the poets. Thus, readers have a formidable guide to both the evolution of sonnet writing in English and the distinct voices of major and minor poets that have accepted the form's challenges and expressive power. This book also includes examples of the
sonnet sequence as well as more unusual experimentation with form such as Sylvester's quadruple acrostic sonnets to his patron and Leigh Hunt's Iterating Sonnet.
In addition to the aforementioned poets, this collection includes sterling works by Sir Philip Sidney, George Chapman, John Donne, Lady Mary Wroth, George Herbert, John Milton, Aphra Behn, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning,
Matthew Arnold, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, Siegrfried Sassoon, Edna St Vincent Millay, Aldous Huxley, Dylan Thomas, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, and many more.

Genres: Poetry, Classics

400 pages, Paperback

First published December 14, 2000

About the author

John Fuller is an English poet, author and critic. He is an Emeritus Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was Tutor in English.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Shawn Thrasher · Rating 2 out of 5]

A poetry-hater might pick up this book of 328 sonnets and not find a single poem to love. It's chock full of interesting, fascinating, moving, complicated, engaging, thought-provoking, interesting (and occasionally crappy, hard-to-understand, definitely-not-for-me) sonnets. Do what I did - start from the last sonnet, and work your way back in time. It's really cool to see the form change over the last 500 years. The poems all get 5 stars, even the ones I didn't particularly like. Writing poetry is magic; understanding certain poems is a different kind of magic, one I don't always possess.

I am giving this book 2 stars because of the format. Each poem is not dated. There is a list of sources at the back, that's all in tiny, hard to read print. I don't know why each poem couldn't have had the year it was written, and maybe even the source. And why couldn't each poem include a little biographical information? For example, Michael Field was a Victorian poet included in this book. Except he's a poetess. Except she's two poetesses. And they were a couple. And they were aunt and niece. FASCINATING. I had to google this information. I should not have had to do that. Perhaps not every reader of this book is as interested in the poets as the poems like I am. But that would have take a stack of really great poems, and iced them up into a far more delicious cake (Fuller's opinions on said poems and poets might have been a cherry on top!).

I'm not saying skip this, because the sonnets are worth it. But expect to google.

[Mark Entwistle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read and dipped into this precious book for over ten years. So much enjoyment from a little book. It never fails me and would be my desert island book of choice!

[Azzam To'meh · Rating 5 out of 5]

One could just immerse himself in this book for hours and hours...

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

This comprehensive anthology contains 328 sonnets by 172 poets, spanning nearly five centuries of English verse. Poets who you might expect to be well represented are: Shakespeare and Wordsworth get eight sonnets each, Milton gets seven, and Hopkins six, with Spenser, Sidney, Donne, Coleridge, Keats, Barrett Browning, Charles Tennyson Turner (one of many poets here I'd never heard of) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti five each; Christina Rossetti gets a whole sequence of fourteen, and Chapman a sequence of ten. Also, as you might expect, Dryden, Pope, Blake, and Eliot feature not at all, and (as John Fuller points out in his introduction, there are quite a few poets writing in English whose best work cannot be found in this form. But even by choosing just the sonnet (and defining it pretty strictly—Fuller admits that he has "tended to be conservative in representing deviations from the basic types"), this anthology ends up giving us an interesting partial chronology of the development of English verse; and the form generates enough variety not to grow stale even after so many examples. Because it is an anthology, there is almost nothing in the way of annotation (even the dates of the poets only appear on the contents pages), which some readers may find unhelpful. Although I remained convinced that Shakespeare did it best, I found a great deal to enjoy here.

[Susan Peak · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good selection of poems that could have done with more in the way of notes. It has a slightly rushed feel when it comes to twentieth century poets, probably because there is so much material - but only one sonnet by Henry seems ungenerous.
The book also doesn't state who John Fuller is, but according to Wikipedia he is a poet and Fellow Emeritus of Magdalen College, Oxford. Omitting any notes about him does come over as arrogant

[Russ · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I began this book, I was worried that the experience of reading it would be like the experience of reading Petrarch all at once: Laura/laurel...got it...oh look, there it is again, and again... Thankfully, the collection covers 5 centuries of sonnet writing in English, from Wyatt to Heaney and even more contemporary. As a result, the style of the sonnet changes as you read, as do the rhyme schemes and the topics.

Though many of the sonnets were familiar to me--particularly those from the Renaissance and the 19th century--there were many that were new. I learned that there were more (and better) sonnets being written between Milton and the Romantics than I had formerly thought. It was also interesting to see how the traditional roots of the sonnet in a Petrarchan unrequited love story get re-written, revised and overturned in later centuries. I was even struck by how differently two authors could look at the tradition. It is clear that Barret Browning was working against Petrarchanism in her "Sonnets of the Portuguese." What I was surprised to learn was Christina Rossetti's response that wished Browning's love affair had turned out badly so that England could have had a true female Petrarch!

As with any anthology, one can argue and quibble with selections and omissions. I was probably most surprised by how many sonnets some poets received while others got only 1. To my mind, I cannot understand how Lowell's "Life Studies" should only yield 1 sonnet when any number of second or third-rate poets could have been dropped to make more room. Other than that, I think this book gives a reasonable overview of the development of the sonnet in English.