Lifestyles

your sonnets attract the eye

I love sonnets...AND midnight!

And the wandering eye is a another creature altogether.  

A Note on the Sonnet

"The sonnet was perfected by Petrarch, in fourteenth century Italy; its first subject matter was sexual love. The Great English sequences by Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare enlarged the Italian tradition by mingling the actual and imaginative experiences of the poet with the idealisms of love. Milton and Donne in the seventeenth century further widened its range to encompass admiration for acts of public virtue and the utterance of prayer in verse. Yet the renaissance hierarchy and separation of genres had a long afterlife, so that a modern like Yeats in "Leda and the Swan"--a sonnet that mixes the pagan theology, a description of a rape, and the prophecy of an impending catastrophe--could still shock readers whose taste had been partly formed on classical models. Since the Romantic period, however, the sonnet has claimed a unique aesthetic prestige. It is a field of exercise for concentrated virtuosity, an invitation to soar and only touch the ground when speech has magically rounded itself, a pattern so resonant that a poet can scarcely write a poem of fourteen lines without courting the genre or somehow alluding to its past. Displacement or suggestive suppression of rhyme may make as true an homage as any overt echo. Whether divided into sections of eight lines and six (octave and sestet), three quatrains and a closing couplet, twelve lines and a couplet, or fourteen at once, the sonnet is a place for intense avowal or meditation, the fixing of a compact and memorable record where the subject is found, held, and framed as if in a single pulse of thought and feeling."

-By David Bromwich in his anthology "American Sonnets" from...The Library of America.

interesting notes sir

I thought you might like.

you thought right sir