A Century of Sonnets is a striking reminder that some of the best known and most well-respected poems of the Romantic era were sonnets. It presents the broad and rich context of such favorites as Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymanidas," John Keats's "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer," and William Wordsworth's "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge" by tracing the sonnet revival in England from its beginning in the hands of Thomas Edwards and Charlotte Smith to its culmination in the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Expertly edited by Paula R. Feldman and Daniel Robinson, this volume is the first in modern times to collect the sonnets of the Romantic period--many never before published in the twentieth century--and contains nearly five hundred examples composed between 1750 and 1850 by 81 poets, nearly half of them women. A Century of Sonnets includes in their entirety such important but difficult to find sonnet sequences as William Wordsworth's The River Duddon, Mary Robinson's Sappho and Phaon, and Robert Southey's Poems on the Slave Trade, along with Browning's enduring classic, Sonnets from the Portuguese. The poems collected here express the full sweep of human emotion and explore a wide range of themes, including love, grief, politics, friendship, nature, art, and the enigmatic character of poetry itself. Indeed, for many poets the sonnet form elicited their strongest work. A Century of Sonnets shows us that far from disappearing with Shakespeare and the English Renaissance, the sonnet underwent a remarkable rebirth in the Romantic period, giving us a rich body of work that continues to influence poets even today.

'A Century of Sonnets' traces the sonnet revival in England from its beginning in the hands of Thomas Edwards and Charlotte Smith to its culmination in the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

'The Anthem Anthology of Victorian Sonnets' is a comprehensive collection of three thousand sonnets written by poets between 1836 and the early years of the twentieth century. The work contains a representative selection of sonnets for each individual poet, in order to display the diversity and innovation brought to the sonnet form by Victorian poets.

This book explores Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets and clarifies its ‘place’ – understood in multiple ways – in literary history. It argues that Smith’s work engages more deeply with tradition than has hitherto been realised and revises our understanding not only of Smith’s career but also of the sonnet in eighteenth-century England.

Though Sonnets Are, Generally, Easy Poems, Shakespeare S Sonnets Are Not, And Very Naturally, He Being A Master-Mind, His Sonnets Are Far From Easy To Understand. The Principal Objective Of This Book Is To Explain The Sonnets For Common Readers, And To Discuss Some Very Topical Questions About Them. The Author Persistently Kept In Mind The Difficulties Of General Readers In Understanding The Sonnets, And So He Meticulously Avoided Pedantry. The Book May Be Deemed To Be Divided Into Two Parts : The First Part Discusses Some Very Important General Topics Relating To The Sonnets; And The Second Part Devotes Itself Entirely To Explaining, Line By Line, The Sonnets, Keeping Close To The Themes Of Them. Difficult Words And Concepts Have Been Carefully Explained. The Texts Of All The 154 Sonnets Have Been Given For The Benefit Of Readers.

When the Scottish poet Thomas Pringle emigrated to the Cape Colony in 1820 he voyaged also into a new creative life and an art responsive to his colonial home, “sterner verse” for “darker scenes”. Accompanying him to the Cape, the sonnet became his most consistent choice for capturing his experiences and convictions, his personal crises and the greater trauma of colonial appropriation and racial oppression. In this study his unique contribution to the Romantic-era sonnet is for the first time given its full due, through readings that are as attentive to form and formal agency as to the cultural, social and historical conditions in which they are enmeshed. Moving beyond colonial theory to consider issues of literary migration, this illuminating work shows how Pringle effectively opened up a radical conversation between the habitual modes of perception and response of British Romanticism and his new, southern world.

Of Shakespeare's sonnets we know the crystalline meter, exquisite diction, and exhilarating surprise of the "turn" in the final couplet. By contrast, we know very little of their subjects and motives. This book does not approach the sonnets as Shakespearean autobiography but instead delineates the customs that shaped the poet's world and thus his sonnets. It argues for understanding them as brilliant, edgy expressions of the equally brilliant, edgy culture of the English Renaissance.