Subverting the Sonnet: Poems (2016-2020) [single-component output with contextualising information]
- Submitting institution
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Bath Spa University
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 3381
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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-
- Location
- -
- Brief description of type
- Collection of individually published poems with contextualising information.
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2016
- URL
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https://doi.org/10.17870/bathspa.c.5174639
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The sonnet tradition presents many difficulties: the compression of the form can produce congestion, the diction can be disfigured and the intended meaning distorted. I have attempted to steer these difficulties towards increasing the form’s expressive potential in a voice more attuned to the destructive realities we inhabit. My starting-point is the controversial proposition that the metrical and stanzaic form of the traditional sonnet is incompatible with contemporary linguistic tropes and subject matter.
In these sonnets, therefore, the length of the line is frequently extended to as much as seventeen syllables: a means of increasing space and therefore the emotional and intellectual range of the voice that speaks as the poem’s instrument.
In each poem the idiosyncratic and strange diction does not succumb to the form and is not disfigured by it. If anything it imposes its own demands: ‘Whatever littlest grief / is a magnified self, which lowers, then cranes its neck.’ Such lines combine Hughes’s visceral intensity with Ashbery’s elusiveness, to approach a transatlantic euphony.
Viewed together, the eleven poems constitute an experiment in how far the form can be expanded without loss of contact with the traditional ingredients. Each poem retains the volta and one other characteristic of the original, be it couplet, octave or sestet. The volta, however, changes location in each, appearing in the third line, the fifth, the sixth—in one poem even the second—in an attempt to heighten a sonnet’s register by varying the beats in a line and thereby changing the overall euphonic effect. Poems 1) and 2) set up a call, and answer: they speak to one another in antiphony. In effect, the sonnet is no longer self-sufficient: the first poem has to regard itself in the mirror-refraction of the second, or is incomplete. Thus it expands the emotional range.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
