12 - The modern sonnet

Summary

If the modernists had got their way, this book would have ended right here. To its late Victorian and Georgian enthusiasts, the sonnet epitomized compact lyric perfection, its critical high-water mark probably being Crosland’s assertion in The English Sonnet (1917) that ‘when great poetry is being produced, great sonnets are being produced’. But to the modernists, the sonnet represented the worst of the previous generation; its formal pattern was complicit with production-line thinking, and its polish with the genteel unreality in which an industrialized culture had wished to preserve its art. ‘The sonnet is the devil’, snarled Pound, because it was the modern West’s first mass-produced, ‘habitual’ form, the lyric blueprint for ‘anything not needing a new tune perforce for every new poem’. ‘Perish all sonnets!’, wrote Wallace Stevens to his fiancée, after reading Stedman’s Victorian Anthology. ‘Sonnets have their place … but they can also be found tremendously out of place: in real life where things are quick, unaccountable, responsive.’ Though Eliot’s ‘Reflections on Vers Libre’ (1917) reassured traditionalists that ‘formal rhymed verse will certainly not lose its place’ with the coming of free verse, he added darkly, ‘as for the sonnet I am not so sure’. And for the surrealists, the sonnet was the refuge of poets who could no longer feel poetry’s unconscious, electric charge, as Breton complained in 1933:

All these ‘sonnets’ that still get written, this senile horror of spontaneity, all this rationalistic refinement, these stiff-lipped supervisors, all this incapacity for love, leave me convinced that escape is impossible from this ancient house of correction … Correct, correct yourself, be corrected, polish, tell off, find fault, never plunge blindly into the subjective treasury purely for the temptation to fling here and there on the sand a handful of frothy seaweed and emeralds.