![]() The most famous examples come from the Victorian period, specifically from the work of the poets Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The sonnets by Shakespeare that address a "dark lady" resemble Wyatt's poetry in this respect.Ĭlassic sonnets by women also concern themselves with romantic love. ![]() It remained a way to express feelings of romantic love, and it continued to be voiced by a lovesick man, but it no longer portrayed an angelic blonde, "Donna." The writer chiefly responsible for introducing the Italian form to English, Thomas Wyatt, described love that had a deleterious, not uplifting, effect on its host. The sonnet underwent another change when it arrived in England. In 16th-century England, Sir Philip Sidney carried on this tradition with the sequence "Astrophil and Stella." Dark Lady The quintessential sonnet speaker has the all the obsequiousness of a knight, but none of his success. The Petrarchan twist on courtly love is unfulfillment. The medieval concept of courtly love informed these sonnets' idealization of the women, whose features the verses inventoried and praised. However other poets, including Dante and Guinicelli, also contributed importantly to the form. Petrarch perfected the quintessential pose of the suffering lover who is devoted to his unattainable beloved. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) wrote sonnets from the 1860s into the 1920s, and his characteristic irony and sensitivity as well as the concentrated ebullience of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) seem to defy literary trends of their time.The other term for Italian sonnet is Petrarchan sonnet, which reflects just how crucial Petrarch is to the sonnet's development and popularity. Alice Meynell (1847-1922) and her husband Wilfred were key figures in England's Catholic Literary Revival. Wilfred Scawen Blunt (1840-1922) and Eugene Lee-Hamilton (1845-1907) both served as British diplomats. John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) was a prominent translator of Italian sonnets and all around man of letters. The Pre-Raphaelite writers, especially Swinburne, were a great influence on the poets of the "decadent" Nineties, including Ernest Dowson (1867-1900). ![]() In addition to Meredith and Swinburne, the late 19th century Pre-Raphaelite group included Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), Theodore Watts Dunton (1832-1914), and William Morris (1834-1896). Although the sequence consisted of rhymed sixteen-line iambic pentameter poems, ever since the poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) praised these poems as sonnets (and Meredith used the term himself in Sonnet 30), they have been widely accepted as specimens of the form. George Meredith (1828-1909) wrote a lengthy sequence, Modern Love, about the ruin of his marriage. Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), best known for "Dover Beach," wrote several sonnets. Other British Victorian writers included here are Thomas Hood (1799-1845), Charles Tennyson Turner (1808-1879), and his more famous brother, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892). Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), who wrote Sonnets from the Portuguese to her husband ( Robert Browning (1812-1889)), is probably the most genuinely popular (and critically maligned) sonneteer of this period. Leavis called an "inferiority, in rigour and force, of intellectual content." Yet, when looked at individually, the poems are often graceful and moving, and their worst, most conventional excesses seem no more ridiculous than the stock courtly love sequences of the 16th and 17th centuries. Much poetry of the Victorian period is no longer very highly esteemed, for reasons that seem apparent after reading a number of sonnets-a sentimental self-indulgence and what F.
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