Why were sonnet sequences popular in Renaissance England? In this study, Christopher Warley suggests that sonneteers created a vocabulary to describe, and to invent, new forms of social distinction before an explicit language of social class existed. The tensions inherent in the genre - between lyric and narrative, between sonnet and sequence - offered writers a means of reconceptualizing the relation between individuals and society, a way to try to come to grips with the broad social transformations taking place at the end of the sixteenth century.
Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Rennaisance England
Why were sonnet sequences popular in Renaissance England? In this study, Christopher Warley suggests that sonneteers created a vocabulary to describe, and to invent, new forms of social distinction before an explicit language of social class existed. The tensions inherent in the genre - between lyric and narrative, between sonnet and sequence - offered writers a means of reconceptualizing the relation between individuals and society.
Each volume of Poetry for Students provides analysis of approximately 20 poems that teachers and librarians have identified as the most frequently studied in literature courses. Some of the poems covered in this volume include: "O Captain! My Captain!" by Walt Whitman "Ode to the West Wind" by Percy Bysshe Shelley "Paul Revere's Ride" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost "Sailing to Byzantium" by William Butler Yeats "Sonnet 18" by William Shakespeare "Sonnet 43" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning And more
In this indispensable introductory study of the Renaissance sonnet, Michael R.G.Spiller takes the reader on an illuminating guided tour. He begins with the invention of the sonnet in thirteenth-century Italy and traces its progress through to the time of Milton, showing how the form has developed and acquired the capacity to express lyrically ‘the nature of the desiring self’.