Sir Philip Sidney’s defence essay, “An apology for poetry,” refers to poetry “as an art of imitation […] [that] speaks metaphorically” (Ferguson, Salter & Stallworthy, 2005: 331). Sidney’s essay epitomises the pivitol importance and art of creating poetry. From the 1500’s to the 1660’s, England found itself a process of complete rebirth of all its important facets. Transformation in its social and cultural, as well as philosophical and religious approaches was evident. This transformational process, with regards to literature, resulted in the redesign of old, successful forms, such as the Petrarchan sonnet. Francesco Petrarch, the genius behind the 14th century Petrarchan sonnet, was legendary in creating a form in which to convey messages mostly thematic to the courtly love tradition. He was, however, completely unaware of the impact and influence the sonnet will have in the rebirth of culture and poetry in England, evolving from Sir Thomas Wyatt’s translations of Petrarch’s sonnets, to Sir Edmund Spenser’s rationalistic approach to the same form. Wyatt’s choice to use a form that already proved to be successful in conveying messages that matter, led him to translate Petrarch’s work, however, with a completely different contextual, individual message. Spenser, on the other hand, used the same frame of the Petrarchan sonnet but making quite significant changes to it, in as much as metamorphosing it into the Spenserian sonnet. Although both Wyatt and Spenser borrowed from the Petrarchan sonnet to appropriate it as a vehicle to convey their particular messages, this essay will aim to give clarity on how their strategies differed. It will make mention of how both Wyatt’s and Spenser’s approaches made use of restructuring and manip...
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As students of literature, it goes without saying that one has to show a great amount of gratitude towards Petrarch for creating this form of poetry. It served as a vehicle to not only voice the frustrations of the birth of England’s new culture through Wyatt’s poetry, but also to convey the philosopical arguments about the sovereignty of art. Through Spencer and Wyatt’s adaptations and redesign of the Petrarchan sonnet, poetry can no longer be referred to as “the laughing stock of children” (Ferguson, et al., 2005: 327). These poets created “speaking picture[s]” (331) with their sonnets which are filled with metaphoric, philosophic and allegoric meaning, The revolutionary in the poetic artform ultimately created the platform to inspire Shakespeare to continue to leave a legacy and to give poetry permanence for generations to come.
The sonnets written by Shakespeare in the Elizabethan era were written to challenge the unrealistic view of women in the Petrarchan sonnets, and this is visible through Shakespeare’s use of the English Sonnet. An English Sonnet consists of fourteen lines, each line containing ten syllables and written in Iambic Pentameter, in which a pattern of an un-emphasized syllable followed by an emphasized syllable is repeated five times. The rhyme scheme in a Shakespearean sonnet is ABABCDCDEFEF GG; the last two lines being a rhyming couplet. The sonnets show the contrast between Shakespeare’s English sonnet and Petrarch’s Italian sonnet. Before Shakespeare created the English sonnet from its Italian counterpart, many poets used the latter until the former was conceived. Shakespeare further developed the English sonnet form to create pieces like ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ and ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds,’ sonnets that used a structure similar to Iambic ...
In Tim Seibles' poem, The Case, he reviews the problematic situations of how white people are naturally born with an unfair privilege. Throughout the poem, he goes into detail about how colored people become uncomfortable when they realize that their skin color is different. Not only does it affect them in an everyday aspect, but also in emotional ways as well. He starts off with stating how white people are beautiful and continues on with how people enjoy their presence. Then he transitions into how people of color actually feel when they encounter a white person. After, he ends with the accusation of the white people in today's world that are still racist and hateful towards people of color.
This one-sided nature of sonnets doesn’t change in later years, but loses it singular focus on these reluctant or absent characters. In contrast to his poem of growing older and unwanted in the extremely personal sonnet “Farewell, Love” the poem “Whoso so is to hunt” is a statement to another individual rather than a lamentation for youth. The Petrarchan influence becomes much less potent and more experimentation is produced. While a specific influence may fade, tested and true devices in literature are still used in modern day works. Throughout the medieval times into the Renaissance to present day the blazon is notable, even if used in various ways. The continuous use of devices or themes shows the fluidity of the human condition and the purpose of literature, the objective is the changing
Billy Collins, the writer of Sonnet, uses a comical effect to make fun of old sonnets, how they were written and the older poets, through the use of literary terms. The fact that Billy Collins speaks with a mockery tone of Petrarch, causes readers to understand how he feels about the old sonnet writers and their work. Collins' tone expresses a negative look on old sonnets, but also looks on the bright side of them. He addresses the issue of how older sonnets were written by old poets in order to explain to readers why he wants to change the face of sonnets today. He is trying to get this main point across to readers so that they understand why he wants this change.
This darkly satiric poem is about cultural imperialism. Dawe uses an extended metaphor: the mother is America and the child represents a younger, developing nation, which is slowly being imbued with American value systems. The figure of a mother becomes synonymous with the United States. Even this most basic of human relationships has been perverted by the consumer culture. The poem begins with the seemingly positive statement of fact 'She loves him ...’. The punctuation however creates a feeling of unease, that all is not as it seems, that there is a subtext that qualifies this apparently natural emotional attachment. From the outset it is established that the child has no real choice, that he must accept the 'beneficence of that motherhood', that the nature of relationships will always be one where the more powerful figure exerts control over the less developed, weaker being. The verb 'beamed' suggests powerful sunlight, the emotional power of the dominant person: the mother. The stanza concludes with a rhetorical question, as if undeniably the child must accept the mother's gift of love. Dawe then moves on to examine the nature of that form of maternal love. The second stanza deals with the way that the mother comforts the child, 'Shoosh ... shoosh ... whenever a vague passing spasm of loss troubles him'. The alliterative description of her 'fat friendly features' suggests comfort and warmth. In this world pain is repressed, real emotion pacified, in order to maintain the illusion that the world is perfect. One must not question the wisdom of the omnipotent mother figure. The phrase 'She loves him...' is repeated. This action of loving is seen as protecting, insulating the child. In much the same way our consumer cultur...
The imposition of the British aggressor is even made apparent through the structure of the work, the two sonnet form stanzas not only highlight the inadequacy of the loveless union, but with their Shakespearean rhyme scheme also imply the cultural dominance of English tradition. The use of half rhymes, such as ‘pulse’ and ‘burst’ or ‘pain’ and ‘within’ leaves the stanzas feel...
"Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal [but] which the reader recognizes as his own." (Salvatore Quasimodo). There is something about the human spirit that causes us to rejoice in shared experience. We can connect on a deep level with our fellow man when we believe that somehow someone else understands us as they relate their own joys and hardships; and perhaps nowhere better is this relationship expressed than in that of the poet and his reader. For the current assignment I had the privilege (and challenge) of writing an imitation of William Shakespeare’s "Sonnet 87". This poem touched a place in my heart because I have actually given this sonnet to someone before as it then communicated my thoughts and feelings far better than I could. For this reason, Sonnet 87 was an easy choice for this project, although not quite so easy an undertaking as I endeavored to match Shakespeare’s structure and bring out his themes through similar word choice.
In “Sonnet,” Billy Collins satirizes the classical sonnet’s volume to illustrate love in only “.fourteen lines.” (1). Collins’s poem subsists as a “Sonnet,” though there exists many differences in it, countering the customarily conventional structure of a sonnet. Like Collins’s “Sonnet,” Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130” also faces incongruities with the classic sonnet form as he satirizes the concept of ideal beauty that was largely a convention of writings and art during the Elizabethan era. Although these poems venture through different techniques to appear individually different from the classic sonnet, the theme of love makes the poems analogous.
Did I Miss Anything? is a poem written by a Canadian poet and academic Tom Wayman. Being a teacher, he creates a piece of literature, where he considers the answers given by a teacher on one and the same question asked by a student, who frequently misses a class. So, there are two speakers present in it – a teacher and a student. The first one is fully presented in the poem and the second one exists only in the title of it. The speakers immediately place the reader in the appropriate setting, where the actions of a poem take place – a regular classroom. Moreover, the speakers unfolds the main theme of the poem – a hardship of being a teacher, the importance of education and laziness, indifference and careless attitudes of a student towards studying.
During the 16th Century, English poetry was dominated and institutionalised by the Court. Because it 'excited an intensity that indicates a rare concentration of power and cultural dominance,' the Court was primarily responsible for the popularity of the poets who emerged from it. Sir Thomas Wyatt, one of a multitude of the so-called 'Court poets' of this time period, not only changed the way his society saw poetry through his adaptations of the Petrarchan Sonnet, but also obscurely attempted to recreate the culture norm through his influence. Though much of his poems are merely translations of Petrarch's, these, in addition to his other poetry, are satirical by at least a cultural approach.
Sonnet 130 is Shakespeare’s harsh yet realistic tribute to his quite ordinary mistress. Conventional love poetry of his time would employ Petrarchan imagery and entertain notions of courtly love. Francis Petrarch, often noted for his perfection of the sonnet form, developed a number of techniques for describing love’s pleasures and torments as well as the beauty of the beloved. While Shakespeare adheres to this form, he undermines it as well. Through the use of deliberately subversive wordplay and exaggerated similes, ambiguous concepts, and adherence to the sonnet form, Shakespeare creates a parody of the traditional love sonnet. Although, in the end, Shakespeare embraces the overall Petrarchan theme of total and consuming love.
From the works of William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser it is clear that some similarities are apparent, however the two poets encompass different writing styles, as well as different topics that relate to each other in their own unique ways. In Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” and Spenser’s “Sonnet 75”, both poets speak of love in terms of feelings and actions by using different expressive views, allowing the similar topics to contain clear distinctions. Although Edmund Spenser’s “Sonnet 75” and William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” relate in the sense that love is genuine and everlasting, Spenser suggests love more optimistically, whereas Shakespeare focuses on expressing the beauty and stability of love.
Roche, Thomas P. Jr. Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences. New York: AMS Press, 1989. Print.
The sincerity that is shown to the reader can be seen in the use of the classic Petrarchan tropes found in Wyatt’s poem. For example, his use of opposites to convey the strength of his love such as the idea that she taught his to both ‘love and suffer’, or the idea that he shall both ‘live and die’ due to his love for the mysterious ‘she’. The use of these well-known sonnet tropes allows for the readers at the time of the poems creation to immediately understand that the poem is in fact a sincere display of the writer’s affection for his muse. This is because this was the norm in sonnet writing forms and were used to display the agonising sensation of the speaker’s feelings of loving a woman who is too distant for him to reach out right. However, from the perspective of a contemporary reader we may view this poem in another way. In the poem we can see that the ‘she’ in the poem is much more distant that other renderings of the poem, such as in Surrey’s translation of the poem as well as the original by Petrarch, which allows for the poem to focus much more on the speaker than the object of his affections. For example throughout the poem we can clearly see Wyatt’s use of words such as ‘me’, ‘mine’ and ‘my’ allows the reader to focus purely on the speaker and the way in which they
John Donne and William Shakespeare are each notorious for their brilliant poetry. William Shakespeare is said to be the founder of proper sonnets, while John Donne is proclaimed to be the chief metaphysical poet. Each poet has survived the changing centuries and will forever stand the test of time. Although both John Donne and William Shakespeare share a common theme of love in their poems, they each use different tactics to portray this underlying meaning. With a closer examination it can be determined that Donne and Shakespeare have similar qualities in their writing.