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Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 721–736, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00454.x

The Romantic Sonnet Revival: Opening the Sonnet’s Crypt Mark Raymond* University of Connecticut – Stamford

Abstract Discussions of the sonnet tradition often claim that the sonnet is ‘the most popular, enduring, and widely used poetic form in English.’ At first glance, the Romantic period in English seems to bear out these claims fully. Keats and Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake – the six, standard male authors of the Romantic-period canon – all wrote sonnets of some type, and undeniably the form achieved extraordinary popularity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, after its Elizabethan heyday, the sonnet in English had languished as a neglected and decidedly unfashionable form. Before the rise of Romanticism, the sonnet form in the 18th century appeared to be dead, a defunct and antiquated genre. Romanticism resurrected the sonnet and in doing so invented our notion of its widespread favor and timeless appeal. The sonnet, even a Shakespeare sonnet, only becomes a preeminent poetic genre in the age of Wordsworth and Keats, who wrote some of the most familiar sonnets in British . More accurately, however, we should credit the sonnet’s revival to an age of Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson and ; poets, notably women poets, who, lying now at the margins of the male-dominated Romantic canon, were essentially responsible for engaging and recuperating the moribund sonnet tradition in English. The question is repeatedly asked: Why did Romantic poets choose to revive such an outmoded form? A recent surge in critical attention to the Romantic sonnet, as part of Romanticist criticism’s larger project of reclaiming texts and authors (especially women authors) long neglected and excluded by the standard canon, explores how the compact and demanding form of the sonnet could open up a space outside of the dominant literary authority in which poetic voices, excluded by gender or class, could appropriate for themselves the legitimacy of a cultural tradition that had long been closed. In opening the sonnet’s 18th-century crypt, Romanticism translates the abject relics of a dead poetic structure into a revitalized poetic space in which natural, spontaneous sentiment and diction could find expression.

I Two sets of questions arise when one starts to think about the revival of the sonnet in the Romantic period. One line of inquiry involves a basic question that finds itself re-phrased time and again in discussions of the Romantic sonnet: why was the form, so quaint and taxing – and, after its Elizabethan © 2007 The Author Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 722 . The Romantic Sonnet Revival heyday, seen by most to have been in steady decline – revived. As David Fairer recently puts it:‘Why did the Romantic poets find the confined space of the sonnet so congenial?’ (‘Sonnet’ 292). Twenty years earlier, in the mid-1980s, Spencer Hall urged instructors to ask their students ‘Why should the sonnet, as a poetic form, appeal to the Romantics?’ (70). Around the same time, Stuart Curran’s Poetic Form and British Romanticism directed attention to the very question that Hall had posed, and Curran’s explanation set the terms by which the Romantic sonnet has come to be approached: the sonnet’s ‘rebirth coincides with the rise of a definable woman’s literary movement and with the beginnings of Romanticism’ (30). Spencer Hall’s earlier question is now refined and reframed. Following Curran’s focus on the contribution of women poets in Romanticism’s formative years, Daniel Robinson and Paula Feldman’s anthology A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival strongly emphasizes women writers in its choice of texts, and the editors’ ‘Introduction’ argues explicitly that the reasons ‘Why . . . these poets [chose] an essentially outmoded form’ must be seen as a ‘deliberate’attempt to create an opening in the English literary tradition, an act almost of ‘self-canonization’ (10). Next to this series of questions I would like to pose a second, corollary concern: why has there been, since the 1990s, this steady emergence of scholarly work concerned with, as Daniel Robinson frames it,‘re-establishing the sonnet as a Romantic form’ (349)? The Romantic revival of the sonnet has its parallel in a contemporary revitalization of critical interest in the form, with attention centering on Romanticism’s role in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century re-establishment of the sonnet as a prime poetic vehicle. Key essays by Robinson, Frederick Burwick, and Brent Raycroft, following Curran, all re-assess the sonnet’s reappearance at the end of eighteenth century in the context of gender and authority, and the sonnet figures prominently in a range of recent books dealing with aspects of genre in the Romantic period – in Brennan O’Donnell’s The Passion of Meter and Susan Wolfson’s Formal Changes, as well as in studies focusing specifically on the sonnet: Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor’s A Moment’s Monument and Joseph Phelan’s The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet. In 2002, the journal European Romantic Review published a special issue devoted to the Romantic-period sonnet, and its collection of essays effectively samples much of the current research trends in the field. The of Wordsworth remains a touchstone, but more often than not the focus is on the work of less well-known women writers, especially Charlotte Smith and her . Seen as a space for establishing one’s poetic voice and for writing within a social and aesthetic context that counters the dominant traditions of cultural authority, the sonnet is used critically to recover the period’s debates about the function of gender and class in self-expression. At the same time, the subject provides a newer generation of critics an array of texts, authors and topics that counter the dominant modes of critical thought inherited from the work of previous criticism. The Romantic-period and the Romanticist revival of the sonnet

© 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 721–736, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00454.x Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd The Romantic Sonnet Revival . 723 both effect the assertion of new voices in the name of a reclamation of an older and neglected tradition. Recent critical attention to the sonnet revival characteristically views it as a Romanticist concern. For example, between the first and second editions of Blackwell’s Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, edited by David Fairer and Christine Gerrard, a number of late eighteenth-century poets, Charlotte Smith,William Lisle Bowles, Anna Seward, Mary Robinson, and Helen Maria Williams, were dropped, with a comment that such writers are ‘well served by Romantic period and anthologies’ (xxiii). All of these poets are noted for their writing of sonnets. As the re-structuring of this anthology suggests, the sonnet has become a Romantic topic. Paula R. Backscheider’s recent study Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry, with its chapter on Smith and the sonnet revival, is an exception to this Romanticist focus. Backscheider places the sonnet revival within the entire eighteenth-century context of how women poets manipulated the choice of genre in negotiating literary history, and her work points to how the historicizing of Romantic texts and authors within the scope of eighteenth-century studies is an area of extreme importance for understanding the rebirth of the sonnet form. In understanding the revival of attention to the Romantic-period sonnet, several issues coalesce to help us frame our inquiry. Intriguingly, much of what has compelled a reappraisal of the Romantic-period sonnet relates to questions and approaches that effectively challenge many of the ideals about the sonnet tradition that were themselves established by the form’s Romantic revival. The notion of the sonnet’s endurance, its broad appeal and prominent status, its sense of perfection as a mode for subjective expression – all are countered by the actual history of the form that Romanticism took up and modified. Critical recovery of the historicity of the sonnet re-establishes the contentions that belong to the sonnet’s rebirth, when new types of authorship and readership put the conditions of poetic genres and dictions under stress – in particular, the work associated with what Curran formulated as a ‘definable woman’s literary movement’, but linked also to the confluence of Romanticism and the late-eighteenth century culture of Sensibility collectively. The renewal of critical interest in the Romantic-era sonnet may be placed, then, within Romantic Studies’ larger project of reclaiming authors (especially women authors) long-neglected and excluded by the standard canon of major (and male) poetic figures, as well as being seen as part of a broader shift toward more historically and contextually minded approaches – away from the more exclusively rhetorically based methodologies associated with the close readings of the New Criticism and of Structuralism and its Deconstructionist aftermath. This is not to say that analyses of sonnets do not figure prominently within these pre-Historicist approaches to literature. From the works of Cleanth Brooks to Paul de Man, many sonnets, and in particular sonnets by Wordsworth, have been read with powerful acumen,

© 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 721–736, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00454.x Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 724 . The Romantic Sonnet Revival and close readings of individual sonnets often appear at the center of key documents establishing the tenets of various theoretical methods – consider the exemplary structuralist reading of Baudelaire’s sonnet ‘Le Chats’ by Roman Jakobson and Claude Levi-Strauss or the significant use of Milton’s sonnets by Stanley Fish in developing his case for a reader-response criticism. What is new, however, in Romanticism’s return to the sonnet is a shift away from attending to the text as an exemplary case and towards a consideration of the sonnet within history and as a document of history, an aperture through which the Romantic period’s own cultural, social, and aesthetic concerns can be perceived. Marking the sonnet historically not only resists much of the sonnet’s claim to timeless achievement, it also returns us to the very reasons why the sonnet was neglected for those long Augustan decades before Romanticism’s rise. Arguably, the sonnet was a poetic antique, if not dead to literature, before writers of the Romantic period took it up and restored both its reputation and its life. Asking the very question ‘why did Romanticism revive the sonnet?’ exposes a paradox at the crux of the sonnet’s reclamation: Romantic studies had opened the sonnet’s crypt, where its Elizabethan relics had lain long in the dust, but the tradition it revitalized elided the sonnet’s death, its historicity and its temporality, in a way that made the genre seem always deathless and permanent, beyond the touch of time. This suppression of the sonnet’s historical disrepute set the stage for a tradition that fostered an understanding of the sonnet, and of the poetic text as such, as somehow transcendent, autonomous, and standing apart. The Romanticist return to the elided historicism of the sonnet’s Romantic revival, its re-opening of the sonnet’s crypt, recovers, in a sense, the historically dependent terms of the paradox of the form’s initiatory gesture, its founding trope upon the incongruity of timeliness and timelessness, whose tradition lies as much in the work of critical thought as it does in the production of poetry.

II And if no peece of Chronicle wee prove, We’ll build in Sonnets pretty roomes; As well a well wrought urne becomes The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombes[.] (lines 31–4) When Cleanth Brooks, in his essay on ‘The Language of Paradox’, analyzes these lines from Donne’s ‘Canonization’ – and appropriates from them the title for his influential work of close reading, The Well Wrought Urn – he glosses Donne’s implicit equation of sonnet to urn as a way towards understanding the atemporal, self-contained essence of how successful poetry works: [Donne’s] lovers are willing to forego the ponderous and stately chronicle and to accept the trifling and insubstantial ‘sonnet’ instead; but then if the urn be

© 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 721–736, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00454.x Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd The Romantic Sonnet Revival . 725

well wrought, it provides a finer memorial for one’s ashes than does the pompous and grotesque monument. (14) The urn, as Brooks reiterates, is the poem, and if, according to Brooks, anything is to arise out of the cinders of temporal and historical (and scholarly) ‘facts’, it is somehow by means of accepting ‘the paradox of the imagination’, which is the language of poetry (21). Tellingly, it is with examples from two sonnets by Wordsworth that Brooks opens his essay, arguing how even the poet’s famous insistence on plain, natural, and spontaneous diction nonetheless gives way to a fundamental poetic situation based on paradox (4). In making his claims for poetic language, Brooks makes ready use of the sonnet and of the idea of the sonnet, and his readings still, after nearly sixty years, offer important insights; yet he really has little to say about the sonnet form itself, apart from, on Donne’s cue, letting it stand in for all poetry, or for all poetry finely wrought. Can we say that there is something about the ‘trifling and insubstantial’ sonnet as such, in its history and its tradition, which makes it paradoxically a ‘finer memorial’ for poetic concerns? Recent work on the sonnet seems to suggest that, yes, attention to the form’s tradition does reveal a history of paradox, specifically grounded in the sonnet’s ‘scanty plot’, that writers have utilized to convey certain anxieties (universally poetic ones involving love and death, or concerns more topical and local). If the language of poetry is the language of paradox, it can be argued that the sonnet, above all other poetic forms, cultivates a situation of paradox, thriving on the inherent contradictions entailed by a text whose brevity and compaction are belied by a tradition that sees, as one of its characteristic tropes, the sonnet’s ‘powerful ’, however insubstantial it be, long outliving ‘the gilded monuments / [o]f princes’ (Shakespeare, ‘’ lines 1 –2). Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, for example, seems to be echoing Brooks when she identifies the sonnet’s empowering paradox as the ‘disjunction between the experiential moment and the aesthetic moment’ (19) – the sonnet’s deep-seated conflict between the ‘insubstantial’ and the ‘powerful’. David Fairer speaks to ‘the irony at the heart of the form’ (again, latching onto a key term of the old New Critical idiom), hazarding that ‘constraints of length and might free poets from wider distractions and allow them to focus their energies’ (‘Sonnet’ 292). Other contradictions, disconnects and ironies might be found: Giorgio Agamben’s comment that poetry ‘lives’ through the ‘tension and difference’ between ‘sound and sense’ is especially applicable to the sonnet (109). What separates from verse, he argues, is the ‘possibility of enjambment’, which he sees as the ‘non-coincidence’ between the ‘prose sense’ of the semantic sphere and the phonetic formalities of meter and rhyme (109–10).1 The tension between sound and sense is perhaps more at stake in the sonnet than in any other poetic form, and Brooks’s attention to Wordsworth’s collapsing of the distinctions between the dictions of poetry and prose lays bares once again the situation of paradox at the sonnet’s heart.

© 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 721–736, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00454.x Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 726 . The Romantic Sonnet Revival

The sonnet tradition is founded on tensions like these, yet one major disjunction in the way we understand the tradition involves a tension whose importance Brooks (and the New Criticism as a whole) worked hard to reduce: the sonnet’s relation to its own temporal moment is fraught with contradictions, and much of what might seem inconsequential in light of art’s and the imagination’s seeming transcendence of the touch of time – the historical, the personal, all the trifles of the prose of life, besmeared with temporality – remain essential to comprehending how and why the sonnet tradition has succeeded so well for so long that it can and often does represent the work of poetry as a whole. Discussions of the sonnet tradition often stress the persistent popular acclaim of the familiar fourteen-line poem. Since its in the early thirteenth century (in the Sicilian court of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II), ‘almost every notable poet’ in Western literature can be said to have ‘engaged’ the sonnet-writing tradition in some way (Levin xxxix). Introduced into English in the Tudor period, the sonnet quickly became fashionable, and thereafter ‘found consistent favor’, as a typical guide to poetry asserts (Bergman and Epstein 245). The sonnet has been called ‘the most popular, enduring, and widely used poetic form in English’ (Bender and Squier 1), and the poem’s appeal looks as if it were universal, attracting poets and readers alike in a way that greatly surpasses the much narrower interest in, say, the elegy or the ode. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, for instance, carry the reputation of being far and wide the most favored and timelessly perfect love poems in the language, and they routinely ‘outsell’ his plays (Edmondson and Wells 144; Hecht 1). As the Cole Porter song notes, a ‘Shakespeare sonnet’ is at ‘the top’ of a select list of cultural superlatives – right up there with Mickey Mouse, next to Keats, Shelley, and ‘Ovaltine’.2 At first glance, the Romantic period in English seems to bear out these claims fully. Keats and Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Blake – the six, standard male authors of the Romantic-period canon – all wrote sonnets of some type, and undeniably the form achieved ‘extraordinary popularity’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Fairer 292). On closer inspection, however, the evidence from the Romantic period calls into question the unequivocal terms of the sonnet’s abiding allure. The uses to which Romantic-era writers put the sonnet, the ways in which the form was appropriated, presented, and received, do not so much simply concur with the claims for the sonnet’s enduring esteem but rather demarcate and circumscribe them, exposing limits and resistances that mark what is actually the sonnet’s more mixed and inconsistent record in literary history. The sonnet, it turns out, has in not always found ‘consistent favor’ – in fact, before the rise of Romanticism, the sonnet had languished as a neglected and decidedly unfashionable form. For about a hundred years, from the Restoration period through the first two thirds of the eighteenth century, the sonnet had, to all intents and purposes, completely disappeared. Few sonnets were read, fewer were being written,

© 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 721–736, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00454.x Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd The Romantic Sonnet Revival . 727 and the word ‘sonnet’ itself had become an opprobrious term, a label for bad writing in a defunct style. The sonnet was dead. If the sonnet now enjoys seemingly universal popularity and prevalence it owes the bulk of its current aura of durability to the form’s Romantic-period revival. Romanticism resurrected the sonnet and in doing so invented our notion of the sonnet’s widespread favor, its timeless poetic regard. The sonnet, even a Shakespeare sonnet, only becomes a top-flight brand in the age of Shelley and Keats – or rather, more accurately, in the age of Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, and Anna Seward, poets, notably women poets, who, lying now at the margins of the male-dominated Romantic canon, were essentially responsible for engaging and recuperating the moribund sonnet tradition in English. If the more generalized guides to poetic forms tend to elide irregularities and exceptions in their assessments of the sonnet’s enduring popularity, one reason might be found in the structure and practice of the sonnet itself: the form’s own tendency to monumentalize and immortalize a singular turn of thought, the crystallization of an event timelessly evoked. As would put it in the mid-nineteenth century, the sonnet is ‘a moment’s monument’ (127), and this key turn-of-phrase nicely puts a positive spin on much of the ambivalence and equivocation associated with the fortunes of the sonnet-writing tradition as it enters and passes through the Romantic period. Aspects of the sonnet’s strict formal attributes, along with the tradition’s own rich (yet conventional) inventory of topoi and tropes, conspire to put pressure on the contradictions inherent in what the sonnet claims to be. The sonnet form has always been highly self-conscious of its own fleetingness. In striving to make a monument out of a moment, the formal compression of the fourteen-line poem and the allusive repertoire opened by the tradition pull the sonnet in two directions, and the text is therefore governed by the tension and overlap of two competing claims. In the sonnet’s space, the momentary and un-enduring are considered and celebrated as if they were timeless, as if they could escape time. Familiar commonplaces about the contrasting durations of art and life coalesce in these moments of monumentalization, this monumentalizing of moments; and thus it should also not be surprising that the sonnet originated principally as a love poem – what better way to immortalize and prolong the threatened fleetingness of passion and love’s affects than to elaborate their incomparability in an art aimed at denying time’s leveling effects: ‘You’re the top’, as Porter wrote, comparing the love-object to a sonnet in what is basically a sonnet-derived trope, traceable back to the blazons of . The and metaphors that animate Petrarch’s numerous sonnets glorifying the idealized features of his Laura, the beautiful and unattainable love-object, perfected a model for sonnet-writing whose influence is unparalleled, and the early modern tradition in English appropriated the style with vigor. In Elizabethan England, sonnet sequences in the Petrarchan mode proliferated briskly. These are the

© 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 721–736, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00454.x Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 728 . The Romantic Sonnet Revival pretty rooms of Donne. Shakespeare’s (at times) anti-Petrarchan stance shows how saturated the tradition was by a surfeit of Petrarchan attitudes and devices, although Petrarch himself could be as ironically and wittily detached as Cole Porter from his own devoted pose. When the collection Shakespeare’s Sonnets was published in 1609, the peak of Elizabethan enthusiasm for sonnet sequences had already waned. In the aftermath of this falling out of favor, what Romanticism inherited from the Elizabethan sonnet tradition was a belated and outdated mode of desire, Petrarchanism gone stale. Few seventeenth century readers had anything, good or bad, to say about Shakespeare’s sonnets, and in the eighteenth century this neglect developed into outright disdain (Duncan-Jones 69). Yet before going underground in the eighteenth century, the sonnet tradition in English was already morphing. Donne, Herbert, and especially Milton wrote important sonnets in the seventeenth century, but their efforts tracked away from the poetics of love’s conceits that so captivated the sonneteers of a century before. More devoutly religious and topical themes appear, yet given the ‘blank’ of the eighteenth century these trends appeared to go nowhere. ‘Blank’ is the term from a Romantic reviewer, commenting on the sonnet’s resurgence after the eighteenth century’s years of dearth (Curran 39), and fill in the blank these Romantic-period writers did, amply overcompensating for the breach in the sonnet’s history by producing an explosion of poems that effectively blasted away most traces of the form’s ill-favor in the popular literary imagination. One must remember that Wordsworth wrote over 500 sonnets – and devoted to the form a quantity poetic lines that would, if taken as a whole, approach the length of major works like The Excursion or The Prelude. That’s a lot of sonnets, and Wordsworth, who ironically came to master the sonnet at a relatively late date in his poetic career, holds a key position in the history of the revival of the form, although what had been the long-standing tradition of crediting him with most the work has been more correctly given to the (mostly) women writers who first developed the sonnet’s sentimental and elegiac formulation in the early Romantic period. It is difficult to assign precise credit for the first glimmers that would indicate the sonnet’s impending resurgence. As Paula Feldman and Daniel Robinson point out, in the introduction to their recent anthology of the sonnet’s Romantic-period revival: Despite the pronouncements of many eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth- century literary authorities on the death of the sonnet, this literary form, in fact, lived and breathed and even spawned in the eighteenth century. (9) The ghost of the sonnet apparently lurked somewhere in the neo-classical machine, although as one learns in the old fashioned surveys of the post-Elizabethan sonnet, such as those by Raymond Havens and Hyder Rollins, most sonnets that did appear in the eighteenth-century prior to the Romantic-era recovery look more like antiquarian exercises. The antiquarian sonnet should be contrasted with the sentimental sonnet, but just how this © 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 721–736, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00454.x Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd The Romantic Sonnet Revival . 729 matrix of pre-Romantic sonnet writing should be assessed leads to a number of potential precursors and standard-bearers: Thomas Edwards, the Warton brothers,William Lisle Bowles, and others. The earliest sonnet, by date of composition, in Feldman and Robinson’s collection is ’s ‘On the Death of Mr. Richard West’. Written in 1742, although kept private and nearly secret until first published posthumously in 1775, Gray’s poem is commonly identified as the text that primes the pump for the effusion of Romantic sonnets to come (Curran 30; Fairer 294). Wordsworth famously directs special attention to Gray’s sonnet in his preface to the second (1800) edition of Lyrical Ballads, yet his comments at this point say little about the text as a sonnet as such. For Wordsworth, Gray figures as the foremost practitioner of a poetic style, associated with the earlier eighteenth century, that ‘attempted to widen the separation betwixt Prose and Metrical composition’ (252), a distinction that Wordsworth, of course, advocating a poetic diction based on the spontaneously natural and ordinary, was very much concerned to undo. At this stage in his career Wordsworth had been avoiding composing sonnets himself (although in time he would more than make up for his delay), and the split personality he finds in Gray’s text – half unnatural, elevated diction, half honest and unaffected sentiment – neatly underscores the transitional nature of Gray’s mid-eighteenth century sonnet and indicates why the poem is useful in pinpointing some of the reasons for the sonnet form’s eventual return to prominence. Gray’s text is readily locatable at the cusp of a rising interest in a poetics of sensibility and sentiment that marks the latter half of the eighteenth century. This new privileging of subjective experience and feeling not only prepares for the full-fledged expression of Romanticism proper but also opens the field for a type of poetic discourse more amenable to a reinvigorated handling of possible topics for the sonnet to convey. Just why the sonnet becomes the vehicle of choice for the articulation of sensibility is an interesting question. Gray wrote his intensely personal sonnet, mourning the untimely death of his friend Richard West, just as the period’s cultural attitudes towards death were themselves being revised. As described by the historian Phillippe Ariès, the meaning of death shifts in the course eighteenth century from a concern for one’s own mortality to a concern for the death of others, for what is lost through ‘thy death’ (55–6). The topic of mortality had always been a commonplace of the sonnet’s trope of immortalizing desire, as Donne’s allusions to the sonnet and many examples of Shakespeare indicate. Yet the rise of the popular idiom of Sentimentality and the development of the Romantic ‘cult of mourning’ parallel the restoration of the sonnet form so closely that some aspect of cultural synergy is clearly at work. For Gray, the choice of the sonnet form, so out of fashion in the early and mid-eighteenth century, signals something about the emotional investment that Gray places in a text that so inscribes the personal significance of his relationship with West and the significance of its loss. As an elided or occluded genre, yet one strongly associated with the conventions of the

© 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 721–736, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00454.x Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 730 . The Romantic Sonnet Revival poetic address to a love-object, the sonnet becomes a multivalently cryptic occasion for the expression of a sense of love and loss that remains displaced – first by cultural or social norms – displaced in turn by death – and finally displaced further by the choice of a poetic form that figures as something like a dead letter, like a lost object itself, a dead poetic body, to the eyes of the contemporary reading public. Along these lines, Stuart Curran proposes that ‘Gray’s elegiac sonnet, the suppressed record of his unfulfilled secret life, is the motive force underlying the entire Romantic revival of the sonnet’ (30). The sonnet’s ‘crypt’, then, suggest not only the place to which the eighteenth century had disposed the genre’s historical ashes, the topos that holds the trope of the sonnet’s death, it also alludes to the conception of the ‘crypt’ as articulated by Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok in their revision of the Freudian theory of mourning and melancholia, a ‘crypt’ whereby ‘inexpressible mourning erects a secret tomb inside the subject’ (130). If the sonnet ‘dies’ in the period after Milton, only to be revivified with the rise of Romanticism, the crypt of the sonnet holds its secret as if in a tomb, and Gray’s sonnet on West, written as the form was just stirring in its metaphoric grave, is an example of what the sonnet opens into in its facing of mortality.

III In Alexander Pope’s mock-Longinian Peri Bathos, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry (1727), the sonnet, coupled with the ballad, appears as a preeminent exemplar of verse born to fail. Apparently generically exempt from sublimity, the sonnet epitomizes, in Pope’s critique, poetry in its lowest form, embodying the aspirations to versification that merely produce language as a discharge or an excretion – ‘a natural or morbid Secretion from the Brain’. In Pope’s terms, the sonnet is a product issuing from the body, opposed to the learned intellectual activity of ‘wit’ and figuring very much within the commonplaces of the Popean critique of bad writing as scatology, in which he is joined notoriously by Swift. Yet part of Pope’s complaint also involves the public expression of poetry. As he argues: From hence it follows, that a Suppression of the very worst Poetry is of dangerous consequence to the State: We find by Experience, that the same Humours which vent themselves in Summer in Ballads and Sonnets, are condensed by the Winter’s Cold into Pamphlets and Speeches for and against the Ministry. (392) The effect of Pope’s satire depends on the public social role of the poet. The sonnet does not fit into this role, or does so only awkwardly, revealing in the public sphere the dullness of the intellect behind it, in to the sublime public working of wit. The sonnet, for the prime Augustan satirists, is a lame public genre. Yet the very terms with which Pope would condemn the sonnet, its natural expression of passion, would within Romanticism represent the key objective of the ‘new’ activity of poetic language. Between Pope and Wordsworth, a restructuring of poetic ideals occurs which allows for the © 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 721–736, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00454.x Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd The Romantic Sonnet Revival . 731 sonnet to arise and take a key place in poetic discourse. One change is that, in the aftermath of Pope, the confidence in the public role of the poet is undermined. As Roger Lonsdale writes, speaking of Gray, ‘The lack of social function so apparent in of the mid- and late eighteenth-century is constantly betrayed by its search for inspiration in the past’ (115–16). This is the arena of poetic anxiety first charted by W. J. Bate and taken up by Harold Bloom, and it serves as yet another expression of the age of sensibility opening the sonnet’s crypt. Given that whatever belated effusions the tradition might have inspired had effectively evaporated by the time of the Restoration and that all appetite for sonnet writing had been suppressed completely in the age of Pope, Pope’s objection to the sonnet points to how negligible the form was in Augustan poetic discourse. The sonnet is for Pope a dead letter, a paper tiger. No one in any real sense was writing sonnets. So why does Pope focus attention of the genre? The sonnet stands for poetry at the dull antithesis of wit: a nullity, so linked to the body that it lies like a corpse, unable to be rise. It is more than bathetic: the sonnet is abject. In the immediate aftermath of Pope, Samuel Johnson would ridicule the language of the sonnet as ‘Phrases that time has flung away / Uncouth words in disarray’ (On Archaism in Poetry lines 5–6). The abject sonnet, like the ballad, figures as a relic, crude and historically defunct. How does Romanticism come to invert these terms of abuse and recuperate the form? The challenge of giving an account of the Romantic-period sonnet revival is that at a very basic level it involves taking into account the constellation of social and aesthetic factors out of which what we understand as Romanticism itself arose. The sonnet, even more so than the ode, represented for late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary culture a lyric form marked conspicuously by a sense of historicism. To engage the sonnet meant to interact with literary and cultural history at an almost concrete level, for the sonnet was, in terms of its horizon of expectations, an historical artifact, an object of only antiquarian attention. On the one hand, the Romantic shift out of the negative history to which the sonnet had been subjected by the Augustan wits effected a way of coming to terms with Romanticism’s own identity in the wake of its immediate Enlightenment precursors. The positive history by which Romanticism re-invented its own sense of the past characteristically re-defined out-dated and medieval models. These Romantic negotiations with the past, all too predictably perhaps, seem to have selected areas of contention, like the sonnet, that allowed it to work against the received neo-classical tradition. In terms of the ‘Augustan’ ideals of eighteenth-century discourse, the sonnet offers a key space in which Romantic-period writers could challenge the dominant modes of decorum and wit. The sonnet functions as a signature displacement from the poetic models of the just-concluded ages of Pope and Johnson. The sonnet becomes the perfect literary vehicle for an age of sensibility burdened by the past. That a great many of

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Romanticism’s neo-sonneteers were women only reinforces the act of displacement that the form’s revitalization provoked. And that this ‘blank’ generation, out of which Romanticism established itself, could make its own claims for legitimacy based upon a form that was undeniably ‘traditional’ – so traditional so as to be as dry and as dead as dust – only highlights the characteristic Romantic irony of advancing the avant-garde by a recovery of the past. In certain respects, the eventual rise in the later eighteenth century of a literary style based on sentimentality and feeling merely reversed the aesthetic judgment that Pope had placed on natural and spontaneous outpourings of poetry. Yet traces of the original force of the Popean critique remain, especially in attempts to discriminate ‘good’ from ‘bad’ sonnet writing in the period. Until recently, the standard approach to the Romantic sonnet may have noted how many women writers participated in the form’s revival, but it would do so with a degree of disparagement or condescension.‘[T]he voluminous outpourings of sentimental melancholy by writer’s like Charlotte Smith and Anna Seward’, according to one account from the late 1960s, produced few sonnets of ‘real excellence’ (Bender and Squier 13). Such comments characterizing the ‘voluminous outpourings’ of sentimental sonnets recall the criticisms of Pope, yet they also point out that perhaps Pope was right to feel threatened by the sonnet and the implications it had for the disruption of the poetry of product and decorum. Breaking down elitist barriers of gender and class, the sonnet becomes something of a democratic form in the Romantic period. Not only women poets, but ‘Cockney’ upstarts like Keats and Leigh Hunt also wrote sonnets, often in friendly competition, that appropriated and subverted the authority of the cultural tradition. Although focused through the meditative expression of an isolated personal voice, the sonnets of the Romantic period were generated as a public and social experience. Whether published with an eye toward the literary marketplace in collections and magazines, or composed through coteries and contests, the sonnets that proliferated in the period were produced in a reciprocating circle of aesthetic consumption and feedback. Sonnets serve as gifts and as tokens of a poetic conversation, highlighting the exchange of cultural capital between authors and readers, especially those hitherto excluded by gender or class from earlier forms of classical patronage. The public ear for the sonnet was also attuned to debate, represented most acutely by arguments over the proper uses of the ‘legitimate’, Italian, or Petrarchan form verses the Shakespearean, English, or ‘illegitimate’ mode. That both manners of sonnet, as well as Spenserian, Miltonic and newer experimental varieties proliferated shows how much space the period made available for an open-ended conversation about the sonnet’s claim. While the authority of the classical tradition in English is dominated, as Wordsworth clearly saw, by the figure of Pope, at the margins of Pope’s aesthetics vibrant undercurrents of dissent can be found throughout the

© 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 721–736, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00454.x Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd The Romantic Sonnet Revival . 733 eighteenth century, and these traces of cultural heterogeneity demarcate the space that the sonnet will come to fill. Both David Fairer and Paula Backscheider, critics working predominantly within eighteenth-century studies, have recently given brief readings of Charlotte Smith’s often-anthologized sonnet ‘To the Moon’ (Sonnet IV) from the first edition of Elegiac Sonnets (1784). Queen of the silver bow! – by thy pale beam, Alone and pensive, I delight to stray, And watch thy shadow trembling in the stream, Or mark the floating clouds that cross thy way. And while I gaze, thy mild and placid light Sheds a soft calm upon my troubled breast; And oft I think – fair planet of the night, That in thy orb, the wretched may have rest: The sufferers of the earth perhaps may go, Released by Death – to thy benignant sphere, And the sad children of Despair and Woe Forget, in thee, their cup of sorrow here. Oh! that I soon may reach thy world serene, Poor wearied pilgrim – in this toiling scene! The first text one meets by Smith in many collections Romantic verse, the sonnet ‘To the Moon’ not only introduces Smith’s work, it also tends, if one follows a chronology of date of first publication, to introduce the topic of the Romantic-era sonnet and, in effect, Romanticism itself. But the version of Romanticism that this text opens into is one whose confidences in the power and control of the poetic imagination are much more encrypted than in, say, Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ or even Wordsworth’s own multiple sonnets. The melancholy, pensive, and elegiac mood of the poem draws heavily upon eighteenth-century modes of sensibility, and with this over-determined subjectivity comes an ambiguously self-reflective speaking voice, the kind of uncertainly self-referential I-persona that fades in and out of Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard. Indeed, Fairer prints Smith’s sonnet in separate ; not, as one might suspect, to highlight her poem’s adoption of the English or illegitimate form of the sonnet, best associated with Shakespeare, but rather ‘to expose the poem’s structure of three elegiac (abab cdcd efef) followed by a (gg)’ (‘Sonnet’ 303) – drawing attention, that is, to the form made famous by Gray’s Elegy. Fairer’s aim is to show ‘the links between the Romantic sonnet and eighteenth-century elegy’, and Backscheider’s reading performs the same orientation towards the progression of genres in the eighteenth century, although her attention locates the origin of the sonnet’s individualization of voice back in the poetry of Anne Finch and her ‘Nocturnal Reverie’ (333). For both Backscheider and Fairer, the interplay of the agency of voice and the choice of genre, which they track throughout the eighteenth century, leads to the ‘Romantic’ expression of the sonnet revival at the century’s end, not so much as the mark of a climactic crossing © 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 721–736, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00454.x Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 734 . The Romantic Sonnet Revival of a Classic/Romantic divide but rather as the development of concerns long at work in the century as a whole.3 Backscheider and Fairer, following recent trends in the criticism of Smith’s work (Backscheider 332), each trace the ‘reach’ of the sonnet’s speaking voice as it moves from personal and localized to more universal, transcendent concerns. But while Fairer sees the sonnet’s concluding couplet drawing the poem back to circumscribed limits of vision (304), Backscheider contends that uncertainties about precisely which mode of voice should be attributed to the phrase ‘Poor Wearied Pilgrim’ (line 14) mark the poem’s end as ‘a transition back to the larger perspective’ (333–4). Such tensions over limits (of space, time, and vision) are, as we have seen, part of the sonnet tradition’s resilient appeal. Neither critic, however, finds the sonnet excessively sentimental nor alludes to its surplus of pathetic, emotive outpourings in the manner that Pope would have satirized or that earlier sonnet anthologists would have found fault with. Forefronting the sonnet’s transitional aspects – between the conventions of the eighteenth-century elegy and the development of the Romantic sonnet, between the personal and the universal, the limited and the excessive – both Backscheider and Fairer introduce the Romantic-period sonnet in a revisionary context, one that corrects earlier, outmoded assumptions about the linkages and differences between the Romantic and Augustan eras. As Backscheider claims, her analysis attempts more completely to ‘historicize’ Smith’s art (332), and the study of the sonnet achieves this effort because the form itself so embodies the bilateral pull that is the sign of such a transition. Whether she is associated with eighteenth-century or with Romantic poetics, Smith’s status as a writer long at the margins of the canon allows her ‘transitional’ sonnets to be read with greater attention to the transitory aspects of the sonnet’s form, elements that have otherwise been obscured by the genre’s canonical claim to permanence. Romanticism may have opened the sonnet’s crypt in order to kill off its Neoclassical forbearers, casting off the burden of the past. So successful had been the work of Romantic poets, women and Cockneys, in purging from the sonnet tradition the ghosts of its belatedness that the sonnet tradition, paradoxically, over time appropriated as its own an aura of paramount, elitist status – the sonnet as ‘the top’ – effectively casting into marginality and neglect the work of many of the writers who had labored to bring the sonnet back to life. Recent Romanticist and eighteenth-century-ist studies of the sonnet focus attention on the irony of this fact, re-examining the tradition’s moments and its monuments, its place in literary history and its timeless appeal.

Short Biography Mark Raymond’s PhD dissertation (New York University, 2005) was entitled ‘Marked by Melancholy: The Character of the Pensive Text in Gray and

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Keats.’ He has taught at Iona College and the College of New Rochelle and is currently at the University of Connecticut in Stamford. His teaching and research interests include Romanticism, the Long Eighteenth Century, Nineteenth-Century literature, the sonnet, sensibility, the Gothic, mourning and melancholy, antiquarianism, aestheticism and transmission studies. He is currently writing Melancholy and Allusion: Coterie Poetics and Cultural Transmission from the Man of Feeling to the Man of Taste, 1750–1820.

Notes * Correspondence: University of Connecticut – Stamford – English, One University Place, Stamford CT 06901, USA. Email: [email protected]. 1 The full quotation from the essay ‘The End of the Poem’ reads:‘All poetic institutions participate in this noncoincidence, this schism between sound and sense–rhyme no less than caesura’ (110). 2 Porter,‘You’re the Top’, Anything Goes (1934), reprinted in Cole 123–4. 3 One can compare Backscheider’s Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry to Fairer’s English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, both of which are structured, chapter-by-chapter, in terms of genres and modes.

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Hecht,Anthony. ‘Introduction’. The New Cambridge Shakespeare: Sonnets. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 1–28. Johnson, Samuel. ‘On Archaism in Poetry.’ Samuel Johnson. Ed. Donald Greene. The Oxford Authors. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. Levin, Phillis, ed. The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English. New York: Penguin Books, 2001. Lonsdale, Roger, ed. The Poems of Gray, Collins, and Goldsmith. London: Longmans, 1969. O’Donnell, Brennan. The Passion of Meter: A Study of Wordsworth’s Metrical Art. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1995. Phelan, Joseph. The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005. Pope, Alexander, Peri Bathos, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry. Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope. Ed.Aubrey Williams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin-Riverside Editions. 387–438. Porter, Cole. ‘You’re the Top’ (1934). Cole. Ed. Roger Kimball. Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 2000. 123–4. Robinson, Daniel. ‘Editor’s Preface’. The Romantic Period Sonnet. Special issue of European Romantic Review 13.4 (2002): 349–50. Rollins, Hyder Edward, ed.A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Sonnets. 2 vols. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1944. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Jerome McGann. New Haven:Yale UP, 2003. Shakespeare, William. ‘Sonnet 55.’ Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Ed. Catherine Duncan-Jones. Arden Shakespeare. 3rd Ser. London:Thomas Nelson, 1997. 221. Wagner[-Lawlor], Jennifer. A Moment’s Monument: Revisionary Poetics and the Nineteenth-Century English Sonnet. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1996. Wolfson, Susan. Formal Changes: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997. Wordsworth, William and . Lyrical Ballads: The Text of the 1798 Edition with the Additional 1800 Poems and the Prefaces. Eds. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones. London: Routledge, 1990 [1963].

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