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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Peter Taylor in triple vision by John Matthias
2. Representation in millimetres by Alan Wall
3. Gianfranco Rosi’s marginalia by Simon Collings
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause and Dreamt Affections| Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych
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Sonnets for all tastes.
Fortnightly Reviews
Sonnets
Cecco Angioleri
Oneworld Clasics | 270 pp; paper | $9.88 £10.99
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A Bargain with the Light: Poems after Lee Miller
Jacqueline Saphra
Hercules Editions | £10.00
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Sonnets from Elizabeth’s
Rosanne Wasserman
Grey Suit Editions | $12.00
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Routines
Keith Hutson
Poetry Salzburg | 40 pp | £5.00 $8.50
By ANTHONY HOWELL.
I ENJOY THIS article by T. S. Eliot. What a great sense of humour he had! But I can’t say I agree with this observation. Satire employing the heroic couplet reads simply as a throwback to the eighteenth century – even a writer as talented as Clive James cannot bring it off. The column of satirical couplets is just too much of a cliché. However, intricate formal patterns continue to intrigue poets, whether of a modernist or of a traditionalist persuasion, and the sonnet is enjoying a revival, but has it ever failed to secure its adherents?
“To love those only who are fond of me” sounds like common sense. Unfortunately, Cecco is in love with an ungrateful slut called Becchina. He’s too broke to woo her successfully. His father wears a cassock and has become a member of a religious order known as the “joyful friars” (sounds a bit as if he had become a “born again” Christian). He’s a mean old bastard, far from joyful, and he keeps his son short of cash. Cecco has a sonnet in which he wishes him dead. Unlike the courtly sonnets, with their Aristotelian sense of a unified ideal – a relationship of shared virtue – Cecco’s work has its roots in a more vulgar style:
This burlesque way of writing…is verse as removed from the court as music hall antics are from ballet.
This burlesque way of writing derives from the entertainments of the underprivileged, from the belly laugh, slapstick, the routines of street and fair. It is verse as removed from the court as music hall antics are from ballet. It provides us with an example of how there has always been a “Satyricon” to offset some essay on the sublime. The topic is well articulated by Mikhail Bakhtin in his work on Rabelais and His World (Indiana University Press, 1984). There are generally two currents – an elite, and fastidious, expression and a fart-punctuated, peasant earthiness generating something altogether less sophisticated – and this binary aspect of culture should always be born in mind when considering high flown expressions of “perfect love”.
Along with Sir Philip Sidney, but in a slightly later context, one of the greatest engineers of the sonnet, is a Scot – William Drummond of Hawthornden. In his informative book The Italian Element in Milton’s Verse (Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1954), F. T. Prince traces the emergence of formal patterns such as the sonnet and the madrigal through Italian poets and critics – starting with Pietro Bembo’s analysis of the work of Petrarch and moving on through the poetic inventiveness of Giovanni Della Casa and the theories of Torquato Tasso. He goes on to identify Drummond (1585 – 1649) as a pioneer who developed Italian innovation in English poetry:
In the footsteps of John Ashbery, I enjoy getting off the beaten track and exploring what he called “The byways of literature”. Ben Jonson considered it worth walking to Scotland to visit Drummond at his castle – Hawthornden – and regaled his host with gossip from the capital, which Drummond duly noted down, though it’s moot whether he was sober enough to be sure that his jottings were accurate. At one point Jonson asserts that Sidney’s daughter was just as strong a poet as her father. Now while Mary Sidney, Duchess of Pembroke, was a formidable literary figure, engaged in translation and collaborating with her father on poetic versions of the psalms, the assertion does not hold up. However, if Jonson meant to say “niece” rather than “daughter”, then that does give pause for thought.
Sir Philip’s niece was Lady Mary Wroth (1587-1652). She assiduously kept the Sidney tradition alive, and in emulation or response to The Duchess of Pembroke’s Arcadia – the rambling novel by Sir Philip with its wonderfully elaborate sentences interspersed with sonnets and eclogues, Wroth wrote The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania – the first novel in English written by a woman. The language is simpler, the action transpires more swiftly than in the Arcadia, but as with her uncle’s novel, there are poems to be found within its pages. In numerous cases her odes employ trochaic metre rather than the iambics which are prevalent in English verse. We favour iambs because our articles and pronouns so often preface noun or verb, and starting on an (unstressed) upbeat gives a lunging syncopation to our verse, like a dance ball-change: and right and right and right. Trochees, starting with the emphasis, or downbeat, produce a march-like rhythm: left and right and left and right.
Does the trochaic, a militant rarity compared to iambic verse, appeal to poets who happen to be women?
Does the trochaic, a militant rarity compared to iambic verse, appeal to poets who happen to be women? Elizabethan women seemed to have a penchant for it. It is tempting to call this an ‘ironic’ use, and risk accusations of sexism. However in the mainstream of so many previous centuries women have been seen as filling a role other than war-like, so there is an irony about this, even if it is historical. Of course, in the pastoral undercurrent, idyllic Arcadias and Uranias abound in helmeted heroines, fierce huntresses, companions of Diana. When Wroth takes up the trochaic mode, I sense an almost suffragette emphasis: Yes, I’m a woman, and yes, I’ve got strong opinions. This is what the metre says to me.
Art and literature as often evolve when some time-honoured element is jettisoned as when some novelty is installed.
Art and literature as often evolve when some time-honoured element is jettisoned as when some novelty is installed. A key development in the sonnet, prompted by the abandoning of an element, was the decline of the lute during the seventeenth century – which enabled formal poetry to go forward in its own right. In the Elizabethan age, a lyric poem was sung – to the accompaniment of this instrument (which had its origins in the Arabic “oud”). Thomas Campion’s song-books contain fine poems which all have tunes, so that they can be sung. He died in 1620, and the song-books for lute and voice had all but disappeared some eighty years later. The Puritan aesthetic which swept in with the Civil War (1642-51) incorporated a distaste for the courtly, profane lyrics sung in the times of Charles I. Declamatory poetry was of course already thriving on the stage, as it was in satires and elegies where rhyming couplets provided columns of verse; however, it is with John Donne that one senses that the lyric poem has been liberated from the need for a musical complement, though musical accompaniment may have persisted with the lyrics of Robert Herrick.
Thomas Mace has the instrument complain in The Decline of the Lute in England after 1660, eight years after Wroth’s death:
Wroth always rhymes the two quatrains of a sonnet with just two rhyme sounds, so the “word music” is of great importance to her. She is not alone in this practice, Sir Philip did this also, and Drummond, as can be seen in his sonnet above. But her thought is denuded of those ornaments which her uncle might have used. She was born fifteen years after Donne, and for all her admiration of her uncle, she employs a simple vocabulary limited to its key words, while her thought has all the twists and quiddities which epitomise that new age of lawyers and divines rather than courtiers, and this suggests a deepening preoccupation with ideas, and a waning of the obligation to create syntactic patterns, in sentences that were figures that aptly balanced each other, while utilising a decorative vocabulary that leant itself to song.
There are also some pithy expressions:
Once a favourite of Queen Anne but married stressfully to one of those suspicious husbands who are jealous not just of lovers (in all likelihood she was faithful to him) but of the company you keep – Wroth had been brought up in a milieu of cultivated conversation – she was given the cold shoulder by Royalty after the death of her husband, and then went on to define her own morality by having two illegitimate children with her first cousin, William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, who was something of a ne’er-do-well. This led to further social ostracization and she fell on hard times, as can be felt from this sonnet from Pamphilia to Amphilanthus:
Note the Drummond-like stacking up of verbs used adjectivally. Wroth also wrote a fascinating sequence of autobiographical sonnets (which appear in her Urania) and a corona of sonnets “dedicated to love”. It was Sir Philip who introduced this form in English with a sequence of ten linked dizains. The corona, or crown, is of Italian origin. In this form, the last line of one sonnet serves as the first line of the next. So, the last line of Wroth’s fourteenth sonnet – “In this strange labourinth how shall I turn” is also the first line of the entire sequence. Josephine A. Roberts has edited Wroth’s poems with a useful introduction and notes (published 1983, Louisiana State University Press).
Introductory essays by Patricia Allmer and Saphra herself give us the background. Saphra does not “close the crown” – possibly feeling that circularity was not appropriate to the wandering thread of Miller’s experiences. Instead, a fifteenth sonnet is made up of the first lines of the others in the sequence. These sonnets are great to read aloud, and they bring us to an understanding of pain and devastation which may be personal or part of a wider spectrum of chaos; but also very often they make us aware of the wit informing that surrealism in uniform. Bloody brilliant!
Sonnets from Elizabeth’s is a chap-book from Grey Suit Editions, which I publish with my co-editor Kerry Lee Powell, who has them printed for us, very handsomely indeed, we think, in Canada.
Hutson is a maker, an assured poet sprung fully formed on us, to any poetry lover’s delighted surprise.
The sonnet comes from a collection of his sonnets titled Routines, which is published in the Poetry Salzburg Pamphlet Series (2016). Hutson’s knowledge of the freaky world of variety acts is exhaustive, from Burlington Bertie to George Gorin and his Pedalling Princesses. But besides the bizarre nature of much of this material – he gave us an impression of a frog/slowly waking up – Hutson is a maker, an assured poet sprung fully formed on us, to any poetry lover’s delighted surprise. He has a wonderful touch when it comes to comedy, as must have been appreciated by Dawson and Howard, but he has a deep knowledge of the history of these acts that inspire him, and a deft sense of rhyme as well, and there is a musicality in these flexibly formal sonnets that adds terrific charm to the amusement.
Among UK poets, at the moment, Saphra and Hutson would be who would get my prizes.
♦
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Publication: Friday, 10 November 2017, at 19:02.
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