Special Guest: Professor Stephen Regan – The Sonnet as a Poetic Form
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In this special episode, Stephen Regan, Professor Emeritus at Durham University and author of The Sonnet (Oxford University Press, 2019), talks to Sebastian Michael about the sonnet as a poetic form: its origins, how it reaches the English language, what Shakespeare does with it that is so extraordinary, and what its outlook is for the 21st century and beyond.
SEBASTIAN MICHAEL:
Today I am extremely pleased to be able to welcome to our podcast our first guest, Professor Stephen Regan, who is Professor Emeritus at Durham University here in the UK, where he was Director of the Centre for Poetry and Poetics from 2004 to 2021. He is currently a research associate at the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne in Australia. He is the author of Irish Writing – An Anthology of Irish Literature in English, 1789 to 1939, published by Oxford University Press, and he has also recently edited The Penguin Book of Elegy together with Andrew Motion; and he is editing three volumes of the forthcoming Oxford History of Poetry in English. And he has literally written the book on the sonnet. It's called The Sonnet and has also been published by Oxford University Press, and it is the first comprehensive study of the sonnet from the Renaissance to the present. Which is, of course, why I have invited him, and I am extremely glad that he has accepted the invitation to join us here on Sonnetcast to talk about the sonnet in general as a poetic form. Welcome, Stephen, thank you very much for joining us. STEPHEN REGAN: Thank you so much, Sebastian. I'm really pleased to be your guest. Thank you. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Tell me then, and our listeners, Stephen, what, quite principally is a sonnet. I've been talking about Shakespeare's Sonnets now for about forty weeks or so, and in the Introduction I very briefly touch on the sonnet, but I never explain what a sonnet properly is. What is a sonnet? What characterises the form? And also maybe a little bit what are its variants? In other words, when is a sonnet not a sonnet? And when, conversely, is a sonnet really a sonnet? STEPHEN REGAN: Well, perhaps the best definition I could offer is to say that the sonnet is a brief lyrical poem of fourteen lines. That's a simple explanation, but there's a longer, more complicated explanation. I like to go to Rabbie Burns, to his Sonnet Upon Sonnets, which ends with an observation that "Fourteen good measured verses make a sonnet." And I like the “good measured verses,” because it suggests to us that a sonnet is not a poem consisting of any fourteen lines, that it's fourteen lines well deployed. And by “good measured,” Burns means metrically consistent or metrically appropriate. So fourteen lines that are well chosen, well deployed. And that leads us into another feature that I think we would tend to associate with the sonnet or expect from the sonnet. And that is a division of the fourteen lines into eight and six, into an octave, and a sestet. So my understanding, just to complicate the definition a little more, is that a sonnet is a lyrical musical poem of fourteen lines, but one with internal dynamics and tensions. And I think part of the appeal of the sonnet for writers and readers – and we can talk a bit about this later – is the the mechanism, the dynamics, as I've said. So pitching eight lines against six gives us a certain sense of proportion. And what you do with those fourteen lines, I think, is the great appeal of the sonnet. We might say, as well, fourteen lines that are rhymed in a particular way, traditionally; of course, the sonnet has developed in multiple ways, and again, we can talk about this further, but traditionally we would think of fourteen rhymed lines. And the deployment of rhymes across the fourteen lines leads to infinite variation, infinite possibilities. So that would be my initial go at having a definition. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: And I'm struck when I hear you say things like “an octave and a sestet:” they are effectively musical terms. And I think you just called it 'a musical lyrical form'. And my understanding is – and you may be able to expound on this a bit – that the word sonnet itself stems from Italian sonetto, and that, I suppose, leads into the question directly, then, where does the sonnet originally stem from? Is it in its origin a musical format? STEPHEN REGAN: So I think the sonnet was musical in the sense that it came out of pre-existing stanzas, as far as I can tell. So we can be fairly confident about where the sonnet came from and when it was invented, and I choose that word carefully, because, as Burns suggests, the sonnet is made: forms like the sonnet don't drop ready made out of the the sky; often they evolve out of other forms. What we know of the sonnet is that probably it came from the merging of two existing poetic or lyric forms, possibly peasant songs in Sicily combined with other forms such as the canzoni, which could be of varying length. But we think that around 1230 or during the 1230s this form, called ‘the sonnet’, developed, and where it developed was in the court of Emperor Frederick II of Sicily, and we're fairly sure that it was one of his notaries, one of his legal assistants, a man called Giacomo da Lentino, possibly da Lentini, who had developed this form, and that it took off initially within that court circle. Now it sounds very much as if it was initially a musical form; you’re absolutely right, it comes from sonetto, which is a diminutive of sono, sound. So: ‘small sound’. I like to think of the sonnet as a small space where all kinds of inventive, creative things can happen. One of the really striking developments in the sonnet, I think, is the way in which it can be both musical – and we hear it in Shakespeare, obviously, we hear it in rhythm and we hear it in rhyme – but also the way it accommodates the spoken voice. And I think chiefly in terms of the way it's developed over centuries, it’s that capacity for accommodating the voice and allowing the voice to articulate often very complex thoughts and feelings. So, you asked me earlier what are the characteristics of the sonnet, and I didn't really hit that head on, so I'll give that a go now. One of the things I've thought a lot about is how the sonnet differs from other small poetic forms, I like to compare the sonnet with the limerick, on the one hand, which is also a short poetic form, something like the villanelle, which is a, let's say, a more refined or rarefied poetic form on the other hand. Everything in a limerick, including rhyme and rhythm and its own special brevity, make for comedy. So the function, if you like, is to provoke laughter. With the villanelle, something different happens: it's very much about repetition and return and circularity. The sonnet is different from both of those, and I think one of the great characteristics of the sonnet is its capacity for deep thought. I like to think of it as a form that allows for reflection. Some of my favourite poets, poets like Keats as well as Shakespeare, use the sonnet in a way that shows us a profound meditation. So I like to think it's a form that allows for deep thought and feeling. It's principally a love poem. We might say that that is part of its appeal, from its earliest days in Italy it clearly was a love poem, but it might be more appropriate to say a devotional form. And that's why poets like George Herbert, John Donne, through to Gerard Manley Hopkins, can use it as a poem of deep spiritual devotion, a prayer-like form, in fact. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes, I believe in your own book, you refer to it as “poetry at its most intense,” which is a phrase that strikes me as particularly relevant and applicable to my understanding, to the sense that I get, of Shakespeare, whom of course we will come to. But maybe as a bridge to Shakespeare from the origins of the sonnet – and you've just mentioned the year 1230, which is the thirteenth century, which is in fact about 350, nearly, years, 340-odd years before Shakespeare is even born – what do we know about the journey the sonnet makes from Sicily and the court of King Frederick II to England and the English language, which of course in itself is at a different stage of its development to where it will be when Shakespeare comes to it. STEPHEN REGAN: They're all really pertinent points, and quite a lot of work has been done on this, though there's a there's a journey there that I think deserves more attention. What we know is that the sonnet continued to be used and developed in Italy. So Dante, who's one of the leading practitioners, writes his Vita nova at the end of the 1200s. So in that fifty, sixty year development from the thirties, we have a refinement there in the hands of Dante. And then probably the greatest and one of the best known practitioners in Europe is Petrarch. Petrarch starts writing sonnets in the 1330s, and Petrarch, of course, also produces one of the most important developments, which is to think of the sonnet as a constituent part in a sequence, because we haven't mentioned this yet, that one of the attractions of the sonnet as a form is that it is both an intense poetic unit, but one capable of narrative extension and expansion, and a great vogue for sonnet writing takes off in the Renaissance. The way in which it reaches England: I've mentioned that it's a court form, and that's really important for a number of reasons, one being that it's tied up in questions of power, privilege. It might be that it was part of the language of court flattery, used to impress important men and women. The language of love is often the language of flattery, and it just so happens that when it travels to England, it travels in the hands of ambassadors, poets who are also visitors in those privileged court circles. So if we say Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, those titles are important. These are educated, privileged men who speak languages other than English, who travel widely in those court circles, who know what's happening culturally and intellectually in Italy and Spain, France, Germany. I ought to say, of course, that the sonnet is developing as a form not just in Italy and England, but in other European centres as well. And that's one area where I'd like to do more research and get a sense of the Renaissance on it Europe-wide. But for the purposes of our discussion, I think what we can say is that the sonnet reaches England in the early 1500s with Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Sonnets start to be circulated. There's an important grouping, a publication called Tottel's Miscellany, in which sonnets by Wyatt and Surrey get circulated. And then, of course, we think by the 1590s – 1591 is a good guess – Shakespeare is writing his Sonnets, though they're not published until 1609. But a lot, a lot has happened. What Wyatt does to the Italian sonnet is to introduce a couplet. So he takes the rhymes of the Italian sonnet, which are what we tend to think of as envelope rhymes – ABBA, ABBA and then usually something like CD, CD, CD – though of course there are variants. But the key point is that Wyatt adds a couplet. So you get this full, resounding sound then at the end of the sonnet. It's Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who devises the interlocking, alternating rhyme scheme that Shakespeare eventually settles on and that we tend to think of as the English sonnet form that goes ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, GG. So we have more rhymes. It's sometimes pointed out in a half joking way that we have fewer rhyme words in English, so we need a greater variety in the sonnet. We have, if you like, a less musical language than the Italians have, but by the time Shakespeare picks up and uses that form, the rhyme scheme is fairly well established. And that leads us on then, to what is it that Shakespeare does. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Exactly. This is, of course, exactly the question that this then segues beautifully into the rhyme scheme is already in place and the format itself effectively exists, then what is it that William Shakespeare does to the sonnet that is so extraordinary that we today really refer to the English sonnet as the Shakespearean sonnet. STEPHEN REGAN: Extraordinary is the word, Sebastian. I agree with you entirely. A number of extraordinary things happen. So, shortly after Wyatt and Surrey have brought the sonnet over to England, we have a number of influential sonnet sequences, and they would include Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella and Edmund Spenser's Amoretti. Both, while they can be very colloquial, are sonnets of ideal love, of yearning for an ideal passion. What Shakespeare does, and this is extraordinary, he gives us what is, as far as I can tell, the longest sequence, the most expansive sequence. But it’s not idealised Petrarchan love. It's a debased love in which the recipient, the object of devotion is unworthy. Not only that, but I think for the first time in the history of the sonnet, Shakespeare gives us two unworthy recipients. It's not just the fact that one of these appears to be a male lover, I think what's highly unusual is that we have two figures, both of whom prove unworthy, and what we then get is a sequence that records a range of feelings, from obsession to self loathing; and I think the range of often sexualised responses – but not not only that – that's what's extraordinary for me. But I should say that there is a technical corollary to that, because I don't think you could have a sequence exploring that range of thought and feeling unless it was doing something new technically and creatively. So what I would say is new and different at the level of technique is intensity. It's an intensity of a kind we haven't seen before, and it happens at every level, from the single word to the line to the sentence, which can sometimes be, of course, more than one line: three lines, four lines, five lines through to the entire sonnet. So I would say something happens structurally to the sonnet, and my way of putting it would be to do with rhetorical structures. And I'll try to give you an example of what I mean with reference to Sonnet 18, which is one of the best known, of course, Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day? That itself is worthy of inspection. It opens with a question. It assumes an addressee, and then in the next line, “Thou art more lovely and more temperate.” – I love the relationship between different registers of language. 'Lovely'. Which is still so much in common parlance today. A ‘lovely summer's day’. We say it all the time, but ‘temperate’? What? How? How does that, how does that function? And how does it relate to ‘lovely’? “Thou art more lovely and more temperate.” And then we think an intemperate person might be someone given to rage or given to extremes, and we see the beauty of moderation in that phrase, ‘more temperate’. So already we've got intensification at the level of diction, of the single word. We then get intensification at the level of imagery. “Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines” – we move from comparison, “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?” which is simile, we move into the language of metaphor with “the eye of heaven,” and then into symbolism, where we have the visage of the Sun, we have the, if you like, personification of a summer's day. So each time, if you like, there's a stepping up, there's a tightening. One of the things that happens with Shakespeare's language, as you know well, is that it gives us multiple possibilities. And here I refer, you know, to the famous work of William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity: sometimes ambiguity can be careless or misleading or confusing. With Shakespeare's language, that's not the case. It's as if words hold out multiple possibilities, all of which have a creative function; a use of a word like 'untrimmed': editors have pondered that single word. Is it the trimming of a candle? Is it the trimming of grass? Is it the trimming of a sail, even? And I, you know, I like what happens in the sonnet there, where I think we can argue it's the sonnet's form, it’s the compression that leads to a choice of words that has such rich variation and possibility. So I like to think of poetry as language working under pressure. And in the sonnet, language works under pressure so beautifully well, because of the compression, and good writers will never feel the compressed form, confined form, is limiting. Far from it: it’s liberating. You know, paradoxically, that's where sparks of creative genius happen. And I find that with Shakespeare's sonnets one after another, that what is happening rhetorically with the play of voice, with diction, line. And to give you just another very, very simple example, thinking of Sonnet 18. Why do we find those closing lines so memorable: “So long as men [can breathe] and eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” It's partly just that simple repetition of the ‘so long’, but the closing line, it's entirely monosyllabic, isn't it? And “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” Simplicity at its most powerfully effective. And also just those moments of pause: “so long lives this…” – And I've studied the original punctuation and tried to get a sense, is it just something modern editors have added with commas and semicolons? It's not. I mean, you read that there's a pause. You hold it. And that sense of internal reflection in the line “lives this” – it's such a beautifully weighted line. So it's the handling of the dynamics. It's the handling of structure that does make those sonnets extraordinary. You're right: that's the word. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes, I find myself very often when I go through these sonnets and when I try to explain what they mean in the translation, so to speak, if you like, I find myself very often saying that there are two, quite possibly three meanings that a word or a phrase can have, and I quite often find myself saying that I tend to believe that Shakespeare knows what he was doing, and quite deliberately gives us two or three different possible meanings, because that's part of the joy of working with language under pressure. And as a tangent to this, maybe, in the German language, the word for poetry is Dichtung. And a Dichtung really is something that is intensified, something that is pressured: the verb verdichten means to make something denser, to intensify it. So it is a dense language, there’s a density to it. There is a pressure built in that condenses what we are saying with language. And this quite elegantly, I hope, leads us on to a next question, because you have already mentioned the two ‘unworthy recipients’, on the one hand, and William Shakespeare as the rhetorician, as the poet who understands rhetoric and has a sense, has an understanding of classical rhetoric and uses the vocabulary that goes with it, on the other. And one of the great questions that always comes up time and again, and that is, I suppose, fair and responsible to ask, is, can we really understand William Shakespeare, the person, the poet, the lover, the human being through these sonnets? Or, there is a school of thought, of course, which says that these sonnets are not to be taken literally, they are not to be read biographically; they are to be read more maybe as abstract exercises in writing. So the question, I suppose, is did Shakespeare, as Wordsworth thought, unlock his heart for us through these sonnets and make us understand with his poetry what goes on in his life with these two unworthy but clearly extremely important individuals in his life? Or are these two individuals inventions? Is he just a great poet who makes us believe that he is talking about real life experiences and real life people because he writes them so ‘real-ly’, if I may use that word, but actually they may or may not exist or have existed? STEPHEN REGAN: It's a great line from Wordsworth in his defence of the sonnet Scorn Not the Sonnet, where, of course, he praises other sonneteers including Milton. And it's an intriguing thought and an attractive thought that Shakespeare unlocked his heart, and I like to think he did. But I want to complicate that a little bit by saying, I would look at the sonnets as 'structures of thought and feeling. I borrow that phrase from Raymond Williams. Structures of thought and feeling, derived, of course, from the author's life. And it's, I think, wilful and misleading to dodge that and try to say there isn't some basis in the author's existence. Everything in those sonnets, I think, speaks so eloquently and so movingly at times, and the capacity of poetry to move us, as we might say, is some guarantee of its truth to life. So thoughts and feelings that we would like to think Shakespeare knew well and had experienced, including those dark and difficult feelings of self-questioning and self-doubt, “When in disgrace with fortune and...” – and those sonnets that often touch a nerve for many readers. On the other hand, I think we have to remember what a great dramatist Shakespeare was, and many readers, and many critics have pointed out his capacity to dramatise situations and events, to modify, perhaps, amend, recreate circumstances in his own life as part of the art of the dramatist. Some actors who've read the sonnets – I'm thinking of Fiona Shaw here saying on one occasion she felt that there were often small plays, miniatures, dramas in miniature, and that's not to say that, you know, theatrical in some ostentatious or overblown way. Not at all. But I think what Fiona Shaw was responding to was the way in which sometimes reading Shakespeare's sonnets aloud, reading them to ourselves, we might be reminded of soliloquies, we might be reminded of the soliloquies of Macbeth or Hamlet, that quality of voice. So I'm digressing a little bit here, but I'm coming around to trying to say something decisive, which is to say that those structures of thought and feeling persuade us that the sonnets do draw upon experiences in the author's own life. But we should never reduce the sonnets to biography, even if we knew what the biography was in full. And we don't. So I would always want to leave that space for artistic transformation of whatever it was, whatever the frustrated desires might have been that prompted those sonnets. They are miraculous transformations, and I don't think it's doing them any disservice to say that maybe there is no coherent linear narrative. I can't look at the sonnets and get a sense of a coherent, consistent narrative, but that doesn't trouble me at all, because what I get instead the, you know, the huge reward, I think, is the sense of mystery and uncertainty. And I go back to the sonnets all the time for that, and maybe mystery and uncertainty and not knowing, and, as I say, frustration, is as much a part of a life as as anything else. I've handled that in quite a messy way, which is partly to say, it is a continuing area of intrigue. You know, I like the Oscar Wilde essay, the famous essay, but one part of me doesn't want a solution. You know, I don't want some great discovery this is for whom the sonnets were written, and we can tidy everything up now. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL Yes, it would almost ruin things if he were to find in a trunk somewhere in a castle in Scotland, the papers that contain the correspondence with the responses that were written by the young man, signed in his name; and suddenly to be revealed were not only the young man, the Fair Youth's identity, but also then with it by some means or other, the identity of the Dark Lady. That would certainly kill off the mystery that partly makes these sonnets so intriguing. But just briefly on that point, that in some of these sonnets we get a sense that there is almost a little playlet or a scene, certainly, at work, I get that sense every now and then; very strongly, for example, with Sonnet 34: Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day, And make me travel forth without my cloak, To let base clouds oretake me in my way? And then this rant, this outrage at the young man for having clearly done something, and then in the final couplet: Ah, but those tears are pearl that thy love sheds, And they are rich, and ransom all ill deeds. You can see it in front of you. You can almost imagine it as a scene in a play, and maybe these are the occasions when William Shakespeare, the poetic playwright, comes to the fore very strongly. And then, of course, yes, the extraordinary range, which is one of the many, many things – they are innumerable – that attract me to these sonnets, that he is able to express so many of the most profound human emotions through his poetry in the sonnets very powerfully, for example, this obsession, but it doesn't strike me as a selfish or a navel-gazing obsession, but a pensive, a philosophical, almost, obsession with time passing, with the way everything is bound ultimately towards death. And this acute awareness he has of his own age in comparison, for example, to the young man's, and his own mortality. And then, on a totally different level, this wonder and also confusion to some extent at being smitten with this young man, and at the same time possibly – in the collection, they come later, but there's a great likelihood, of course, that they overlap – this desire for, this lust for somebody, and at the same time that lust being paired with a sense of disgust at the same time: it is so wonderfully messy and complex and human, it couldn't possibly be more authentic. And that is, to my mind, very much of the reason that makes these sonnets so unbelievably rich. What is the status today of these sonnets? I love these sonnets: the reason I am doing this podcast, the reason I have written a play that tries to dramatise a plausible narrative between William Shakespeare and specifically the young man, is because I just absolutely love these sonnets. But what is the status, if you like, of the Sonnets in the body of work that we know of Shakespeare's? Because my feeling when I talk to people about what it is that I'm doing, is that a surprisingly large number of people really don't know about the sonnets at all, it would appear. People who have not studied literature or who are not particularly, specifically, actively pursuing an interest in literature or in poetry. And among those people who do – referring maybe to scholars now – I get the impression that the Sonnets are not universally recognised as significant. What is your sense, having studied the form in such depth, how does the world of scholarship in particular view the sonnet today? What do people make of it now? STEPHEN REGAN: First of all, Sebastian, I think many people do know sonnets and will remember sonnets without necessarily knowing they are sonnets. I read Let Me Not to the [Marriage] of True Minds at my sister's wedding, introduced by a priest who said, “Stephen will now read a small sonnet,” as if it were smaller than the normal small size of fourteen lines. Some people will hear sonnets at weddings and at funerals. Some will know Rupert Brooke: If I Should Die, Think Only This of Me. Some of the most eloquent lines of English poetry that people might remember from school or from elsewhere are often from sonnets. People might well know poems and not realise that they are sonnets. There are some brilliantly concealed sonnets: some of Wilfred Owen's war poems. Owen was one of the great writers of sonnets. I think one of the things Owen did was, having seen how it could be used patriotically by Rupert Brooke to bring it into war, to give us poems like Anthem for Doomed Youth, Dulce et decorum est, which doubles the sonnet, and therefore it might be that the sonnet moves in civic public life a bit more than we're aware. In terms of the scholarly evaluation of the sonnet, new things are being discovered all the time about the sonnet. One of the things I was going to say about Shakespeare's sonnets, in terms of what we might think is new and different: I think we look at them now, we can look at them in retrospect; what I tried to do in my book was to look at how the sonnet comes into the hands of, say, Milton. Having been a court form, the sonnet comes to someone who is republican, a radical puritan writer who begins to use it for political purposes in the interests of a democratic vision. That's really exciting that Milton can write something like Avenge Thee, Oh Lord, Thy Slaughtered Saints, full of impassioned political rhetoric, but he can write this very sorrowful lament for his dead wife, Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint, one of the great elegiac sonnets. I would want to give Shakespeare some of the credit for this. Earlier today I was thinking about Sonnet 55, Sonnet 107, where he's meditating on, you know, “tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass.” I think there's a humbling process in some of those sonnets, and we can see a vision that has to do with worth, and it's partly to do with the worth and the lasting value of poetry itself, isn't it? “So long as men [can breathe], and eyes can see | so long lives this…” – the work of writing itself has a value that exceeds that of monuments and tombs. And from there, you know, there's a line through to Shelley's Ozymandias, again, upon we often forget is a sonnet, to those songs of liberty in the hands of Shelley and Wordsworth, through to our own time. So that process of democratisation, I think, in a way, has kept the sonnet alive. What I would say in a very positive, optimistic way, if we look at the course of poetic development in English, you know, across America, Ireland, as well as Great Britain, all those great poets, Auden, Robert Frost in America, Edna Saint Vincent Millay, a great prolific writer of sonnets, Geoffrey Hill, moving to nearer contemporary times, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon: I'm just reading sonnets at the moment by African American writers like Terrance Hayes, writing a book of American sonnets, or the Louisiana poet I've been reading recently, Jericho Brown: very, very recent writing and tapping the sonnet. The poem called The Tradition, which is the title poem of a book by Jericho Brown, is thinking of the whole tradition of poetry, but of planting and growing. But he's also thinking of American citizens cut down, people whose lives are prematurely ended. So the sonnet has great vitality at the moment. The amazing thing is that it's carried on being used so widely in ways that other forms like the villanelle, for instance, are not. Of all of those older, established poetic forms, the sonnet is the one with most resilience, most staying power, if you like. So my sense of where it's at, how it's regarded: certainly very, very highly regarded among writers and readers of poetry as well, I would say. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes. I'm glad you mentioned Ozymandias there, because that is a prime example, really, of a poem that I, for one, absolutely adore and have always, ever since I first came across it, but that I did not actually realise until comparatively recently that it was a sonnet. But the sonnet as a form seems to thrive then into the twentieth and twenty-first century, and has a future there and beyond, would you say? STEPHEN REGAN: Definitely. And it does have something to do with how it lends itself to such a range of subject matter. I mentioned Milton, Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint. There is something in the brevity of the sonnet that makes it an ideal form for lament and for grieving. One of the poets who has used the sonnet form but has, if you like, chosen a variant form, is Tony Harrison, from Leeds but living in the northeast of England. He writes a sixteen line sonnet, as did George Meredith, a Victorian poet who wrote a sequence titled Modern Love. Now, to go back to your question ‘when is a sonnet not a sonnet?’ Quite a few people might say, well, if it has sixteen lines, how can it be sonnet? The argument is that if it's written with the originating fourteen line form in mind, varying from that with a sense of how the sonnet works, then we can still call it a sonnet. And to give you a sense of what I mean: in the conventional sonnet, the eight/six line division creates a certain tension or dynamic. Tony Harrison would say he needs just a little bit extra sometimes, and it might be that he wants to give us eight and six plus a couplet to give it a further power. Or rather than dividing the octave into two quatrains and then the sestet into a quatrain and a couplet, which is how some of Shakespeare's sonnets appear to work structurally, with that further subdivision, he might do something like four times four. He might work with four quatrains, giving us sixteen lines, and then attempt to build those into sequences. He writes sonnets of an elegiac kind, often sonnets for his parents. Seamus Heaney's Great Clearances sequence, written for his mother, I think, is one of the great sonnet sequences of the later twentieth century, and showing how the sonnet can be a form of mourning. And we might say it does go back to Shakespeare. Thinking of, you know, That Time of Year Thou Mayst in Me Behold, which in a way is a kind of self-elegy, isn't it? Of, you know, it's a mourning of his own mortality, but that capacity for grieving is there in the sonnet at a very early stage. Then the sonnet is the perfect form for impressions, memories, particularly in travel. And one of Wordsworth's great achievements he's not often given credit for is to write a kind of travelogue sequences that have to do with places he's visited. Some people might remember his Sonnet Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, written on his way to France, apparently; it's not sure whether he wrote it on the top of a stagecoach, or whether he visited France, and then came back and wrote the sonnet. But the idea of the sonnet as a portable form appeals to writers in moments of travel, gathering impressions and memories, whether of a landscape or a… – could be an urban scene. So it has a topographical history as well. Many, many nature sonnets. It's a form that's been carried into war, as I suggested with Wilfred Owen. It's a form of prayer with Hopkins and Herbert, as we've said before. So that multiple subject matter that it's capable of dealing with accounts for part of its continuing success, I think, as a poetic form.. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes, and you mention structure, of course, there, and it brings me back to a quote I particularly like of Walter Gropius, the architect, in a different context talking about how they were trying to teach architecture at Bauhaus. And he draws a parallel there to counterpoint in music. And the reason I have this present is because I'm working on a series of lectures together with a professor in Vienna. And so I came across this where he says – and this is the quote – “if the musical thought is not to sink into chaos, it requires that counterpoint be mastered, because the freedom of creation does not rest upon the absence of boundaries within form and means of expression, but on the free motion within a strictly set delimitation.” And this to me tells us a lot about the sonnet: we have this form which seems to be really very restrictive, almost rigid, one might say, almost a corset. But the freedom it gives us as writers, as poets, as human beings, when we are a William Shakespeare or a Seamus Heaney or a Wordsworth, seems extraordinary and allows for a flourishing of language that is truly miraculous. STEPHEN REGAN: Yes, I think of Wordsworth's sonnet Nuns Fret Not in Their Convent Cells, which leads him to dwell upon the freedom that the sonnet allows, and he gives examples of that freedom within constraint. And of course Robert Frost, who is a great writer of sonnets, I think the great American sonnet writer of the twentieth century – someone Seamus Heaney learns from, by the way, Heaney calls him a master of the sonnet – saying he couldn't understand why poets wanted to write in this thing called 'free verse'. He said it was like playing tennis with the net down. You might have heard this one before, but Baudelaire, of course, used architectural structure as a way of explaining why the sonnet appealed to him. But that's a great quotation, no, thank you. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: I'm slightly conscious of the time. I know it must be getting into the latter part of the evening in Melbourne, where you are. And so perhaps as a bonus question – I'm not sure I can call this a bonus question – I wasn't going to ask you this and you may simply not wish to answer it. On the other hand, it may be something that fascinates you. So I'm going to pose it anyway, and I shan't be offended if you simply refuse to enter in on it. The issue has flared up again here just very recently because of something the actor Mark Rylance appears to have been saying, whether William Shakespeare actually existed, whether he was William Shakespeare, or, phrased differently: ‘but who was William Shakespeare?’ Was he William Shakespeare, or was he a woman? Was he an English nobleman? Was he a collection of things? Do you have a view on this? Do you want to enter in on this debate? Did Shakespeare exist? Did he write his own works? Are we making a categorical mistake if we think we know that there was a man called William Shakespeare whom we revere almost, or certainly respect very highly, and love for the language and the works and the insight into human nature he has given us? STEPHEN REGAN: I suspect that there were moments of collaboration. We have evidence for thinking that occasionally there was collaboration. But the biography, I think, is secure. And I think of great recent work by writers like Stephen Greenblatt. I would want to believe and hold to the idea that there is an author, Shakespeare, to whom the vast majority of what we know as the work of Shakespeare can be attributed. And I think the technology that we've used gives us an indication that there might be similarities with the work of some of his contemporaries. I'm not aware of anything that would suggest conclusively Shakespeare isn't the author of what we think of as the canon of his of his work. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Brilliant. Thank you. I think that's a very beautiful and positive and affirmative note on which to bring this special edition of Sonnetcast to a conclusion. Thank you very, very much, Professor Stephen Regan. The book, entitled The Sonnet, published by Oxford University Press, is available wherever you buy your books, and I can only wholeheartedly recommend it. |
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