What do you think?
Rate this book
English Sonnets
A collection of English sonnets, including the work of poets such as D.G. Rossetti and William Shakespeare.
- GenresPoetry
128 pages, Paperback
First published April 15, 1999
1 person is currently reading
1 person want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 30, 2019
Edited by A.D.P Briggs & originally published in 1999 this is a collection of 191 English language Sonnets. It is a collection that is mainly by the 'great' poets - so there's lots of Shakespeare, Shelley, Swinburne, Keats, Tennyson & Wordsworth.
It's also very masculine, although Elizabeth Barrett Browning gets four poems, including her most famous poem, which here is called 'How do I love thee?'; George Eliot gets two; Alice Meynell gets two; Edith Nesbit gets one Christina Rosetti gets ten and Elinor Wylie gets one. A grand total of 20 from 191 poems.
Brigg's selection criteria doesn't seem to be entirely based on quality either. He includes Tennyson's 'A Farewell to Poetry' even though it includes line 12, which Briggs himself says is '...one of the worst in English poetry' in his notes. (Of which there are not many.) And Wordsworth's 'Occasioned by the Battle of Waterloo, February 1816', which is as bad a war poem as Pinter's 'American Football'* but with less swearing.
Basically, this is an interesting selection of poems. There's a lot of poetry about poetry and poets here. I counted four sonnets about sonnets. There's - obviously - a lot of poems here about love and lovers and death, including Donne's magnificent 'Death Be Not Proud', which always makes me think of Dylan Thomas's 'Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night' even though they in many ways in opposition to each other.
What this book does do, which I think poetry selections should do, is make you want to read more poetry. I found myself wondering whether I should read more of Hardy's poetry. George Eliot's too. And Rupert Brooke's non-war poetry. If there is much of that. I find btw with Brooke I can't read 'The Soldier' without brushing it with a kind of modern acerbic irony that I don't think it is meant to have. I think Brooke wrote it absolutely without irony. John Clare is another poet who I'd like to read more of. And Bramwell Bronte's one poem here, 'On Peaceful Death and Painful Life' makes me wonder how much other poetry he wrote and whether it is as good.
Anyway, let me end with a little quote:
"A Sonnet is a moment's monument, -
Memorial from the Soul's eternity
To one dead deathless hour..."
I suspect this is out of print btw. I stumbled across it in a charity shop in Teignmouth, Devon.
*This is my go to choice when listing bad war poems. I first came across it in a book called 101 War Poems, which was an anti-Iraq war poetry collection where its awfulness was made more obvious by the general quality of the work around it. Not even seeing it performed live as part of the Pinter Theatre's Pinter season can make me think of it as anything less than awful. Wordsworth's poem is pretty bad. But not as bad.
It's also very masculine, although Elizabeth Barrett Browning gets four poems, including her most famous poem, which here is called 'How do I love thee?'; George Eliot gets two; Alice Meynell gets two; Edith Nesbit gets one Christina Rosetti gets ten and Elinor Wylie gets one. A grand total of 20 from 191 poems.
Brigg's selection criteria doesn't seem to be entirely based on quality either. He includes Tennyson's 'A Farewell to Poetry' even though it includes line 12, which Briggs himself says is '...one of the worst in English poetry' in his notes. (Of which there are not many.) And Wordsworth's 'Occasioned by the Battle of Waterloo, February 1816', which is as bad a war poem as Pinter's 'American Football'* but with less swearing.
Basically, this is an interesting selection of poems. There's a lot of poetry about poetry and poets here. I counted four sonnets about sonnets. There's - obviously - a lot of poems here about love and lovers and death, including Donne's magnificent 'Death Be Not Proud', which always makes me think of Dylan Thomas's 'Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night' even though they in many ways in opposition to each other.
What this book does do, which I think poetry selections should do, is make you want to read more poetry. I found myself wondering whether I should read more of Hardy's poetry. George Eliot's too. And Rupert Brooke's non-war poetry. If there is much of that. I find btw with Brooke I can't read 'The Soldier' without brushing it with a kind of modern acerbic irony that I don't think it is meant to have. I think Brooke wrote it absolutely without irony. John Clare is another poet who I'd like to read more of. And Bramwell Bronte's one poem here, 'On Peaceful Death and Painful Life' makes me wonder how much other poetry he wrote and whether it is as good.
Anyway, let me end with a little quote:
"A Sonnet is a moment's monument, -
Memorial from the Soul's eternity
To one dead deathless hour..."
I suspect this is out of print btw. I stumbled across it in a charity shop in Teignmouth, Devon.
*This is my go to choice when listing bad war poems. I first came across it in a book called 101 War Poems, which was an anti-Iraq war poetry collection where its awfulness was made more obvious by the general quality of the work around it. Not even seeing it performed live as part of the Pinter Theatre's Pinter season can make me think of it as anything less than awful. Wordsworth's poem is pretty bad. But not as bad.
June 20, 2024
I learned how to bend a few of the old-time sonnet rules from this little volume, and also got the chance to revisit some old favorites that stick to their guns. Several featured poets took me by surprise, Edgar Allen Poe and Herman Melville in particular. Who knew?
I read several of these gentlemen...oh, apologies, the publisher did throw a light dusting of women into this mix...aloud, and I especially enjoyed this one, entitled Air Raid Warning (a Monosyllabic Sonnet):
Though
Night
Fright
Grow,
No
Bright
Light
Show!
This
Law
Is
For
You
Too!
Thought that was fun.
Thank you to one of my children, I think it's you, Greg, for giving this to me straight from my Amazon wish list.
I read several of these gentlemen...oh, apologies, the publisher did throw a light dusting of women into this mix...aloud, and I especially enjoyed this one, entitled Air Raid Warning (a Monosyllabic Sonnet):
Though
Night
Fright
Grow,
No
Bright
Light
Show!
This
Law
Is
For
You
Too!
Thought that was fun.
Thank you to one of my children, I think it's you, Greg, for giving this to me straight from my Amazon wish list.
August 29, 2007
this is my first sonnets book, never thought I could enjoy such a profounding compilation. thanks to pak Ignas Kleden who taught me how to appreciate poems
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews