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19 books match the query 'Sonnets'

cover of All Things At Once: Sonnets and Songs

All Things At Once

Sonnets and Songs

Roger Armbrust

Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2022

Armbrust writes sonnets on a variety of themes, primarily addressed to his muse and his lovers. Since 1979, when his first book of poetry went to press, he continues to write, as if he opens a vein to pour his own blood onto the page to do it.
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cover of Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants: Recovering the African American Poetry of the 1930s

Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants

Recovering the African American Poetry of the 1930s

Jon Woodson

The Ohio State University Press, 2011

In the 1930s African Americans faced three distinct historical crises that impacted the lives of African Americans directly—the Great Depression, the existential-identity crisis, and the Italo-Ethiopian War, with its threat of a race war. A sizeable body of black poetry was produced in this decade, which captured the new modes of autonomy through which black Americans resisted these social calamities. Much of it, however, including the most influential protest poems, was dismissed as “romantic” by major, leftist critics and anthologists.
 
Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants: Recovering the African American Poetry of the 1930s, by Jon Woodson, uses social philology to unveil social discourse, self fashioning, and debates in poems gathered from anthologies, magazines, newspapers, and individual collections. The first chapter examines three long poems, finding overarching jeremiadic discourse that inaugurated a militant, politically aware agent. Chapter two examines self-fashioning in the numerous sonnets that responded to the new media of radio, newsreels, movies, and photo-magazines. The third chapter shows how new subjectivities were generated by poetry addressed to the threat of race war in which the white race was exterminated.
 
The black intellectuals who dominated the interpretative discourses of the 1930s fostered exteriority, while black culture as a whole plunged into interiority. Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants delineates the struggle between these inner and outer worlds, a study made difficult by a contemporary intellectual culture which recoils from a belief in a consistent, integrated self.
 
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cover of Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism

Desiring Voices

Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism

Mary B. Moore

Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her Sonnets from the Portuguese.Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism proposes that we attend to the ways that women poets from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries have both echoed and transformed the literary and erotic conventions that strongly influenced their fates as women, wives, and lovers.

Mary B. Moore analyzes and provides context for love sonnet sequences by Italian, French, English, and American women poets in the light of current knowledge concerning attitudes towards women at the time they wrote. Through close readings of the poems combined with theory and criticism about constructs of women, historical events, and biographical contexts, Moore reveals patterns of revision among women poets that shed further light on the poets themselves, on Petrarchism as a convention, and on ideas about women. She focuses on Petrarchan sonnet sequences by women because the poems serve both as works of art and as documents that illuminate the range and limitations of female roles as erotic subjects (agents of speech, action, knowledge, and desire) as well as their more usual roles as erotic objects.

Combining theory with close reading, Moore enhances the value of many generally neglected poems by women. After a thorough discussion of the Petrarchan sonnet tradition, she analyzes the work of Gaspara Stampa, Louise Labé, Lady Mary Wroth, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

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cover of Divers

Divers

Samuel Amadon

Omnidawn, 2026

Marking a formal reinvention for the poet, this collection addresses the strangeness of time, blending writers and images from the past with contemporary scenes.

This book-length sequence of turbulent sonnets follows their speaker's impulses and imagination through the seasons of their composition. Written between 2016 and 2022, Divers is a collection shaped by contradiction and marks a new period of lyric experimentation for poet Sam Amadon. These poems are rigorously constrained while also making space for improvisation. They hold to a decasyllabic line while moving in and out of meter. They sing of time, and struggle to understand it. They find words for our moment in the pages of old books. Lines from great writers of the past—including Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Wyatt, and Michael Drayton—echo through Amadon's poems of contemporary menace and wonder. Here we see both the owls lining our fences and the black SUVs rolling down our streets. Out of these conflicts, Amadon’s sonnets step up, lift off, and dive into themselves.

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cover of Ghost Smoke

Ghost Smoke

Jonathan Weinert and H. L. Hix

Bridwell Press, 2026

“Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” wrote Walt Whitman. Poets H. L. Hix and Jonathan Weinert adopted Whitman’s declaration as a guiding principle for Ghost Smoke. In this “Song of Themself,” Hix and Weinert merge their voices to create a spirited book-length hybrid poem that meditates on distance, listening, finitude, and different kinds of love. Fabricated of material collected from over two decades of correspondence and collaboration, Ghost Smoke borrows the structure of a crown of sonnets, completing a circuit that seeks to defeat the standard distinctions between question and answer, presence and absence, self and other. Is it possible to find a language that can allow us to become more porous to one another, to listen more deeply to one another and to respond in kind? Can we become each other’s ghosts, open to and inhabited by one another? What happens to us, and what happens between us, if we do?

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cover of Harmful Eloquence: Ovid's Amores from Antiquity to Shakespeare

Harmful Eloquence

Ovid's Amores from Antiquity to Shakespeare

M. L. Stapleton

University of Michigan Press, 1996

M. L . Stapleton's Harmful Eloquence: Ovid's "Amores" from Antiquity to Shakespeare traces the influence of the early elegiac poetry of Ovid (43 b.c.e.-17 c.e.) on European literature from 500-1600 c.e. The Amores served as a classical model for love poetry in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and were essential to the formation of fin' Amors, or "courtly love." Medieval Latin poets, the troubadours, Dante, Petrarch, and Shakespeare were all familiar with Ovid in his various forms, and all depended greatly upon his Amores in composing their cansos, canzoniere, and sonnets.
Harmful Eloquence begins with a detailed analysis of the Amores themselves and their artistic unity. It moves on to explain the fragmentary transmission of the Amores in the "Latin Anthology" and the cohesion of the fragments into the conventions of Medieval Latin and troubadour "courtly love" poetry. Two subsequent chapters explain the use of the Amores, their narrator, and the conventions of "courtly love" in the poetry of both Dante and Petrarch. The final chapter concentrates on Shakespeare's reprocessing and parody of this material in his sonnets.
Harmful Eloquence analyzes the intertextual transmission of the Amores in major medieval and Renaissance love poetry for the first time. No previous study has devoted itself exclusively to this Ovidian text in this particular way. The premise that Ovid consciously used the device of persona from the very beginning of his writing career is fully explored, as is the "Ovidian hypothesis" of Wilibald Schroetter. Connections between Dante's La vita nuova and the Amores are newly discovered; significant for Shakespeare studies, the use of Christopher Marlowe's translation of the Amores by Shakespeare in his "dark lady" sonnets is also carefully analyzed for the first time.
Medievalists, classicists, and scholars of Renaissance studies will find Harmful Eloquence particularly engaging and useful, as will all those interested in the process and methods of literary transmission.
M. L. Stapleton is Associate Professor of English, Stephen F. Austin University.
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cover of Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics

Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England

A Cultural Poetics

Bruce R. Smith

University of Chicago Press, 1994

In the most comprehensive study yet of homosexuality in the English Renaissance, Bruce R. Smith examines and rejects the assessments of homosexual acts in moral philosophy, laws, and medical books in favor of a poetics of homosexual desire. Smith isolates six different "myths" from classical literature and discusses each in relation to a particular Renaissance literary genre and to a particular part of the social structure of early modern England. Smith's new Preface places his work in the context of the continuing controversies in gay, lesbian, and bisexual studies.

"The best single analysis of the homoerotic element in Renaissance English literature."—Keith Thomas, New York Review of Books

"Smith's lucid and subtle book offer[s] a poetics of homosexual desire. . . . Its scholarship, impressively broad and deftly deployed, aims to further a serious social purpose: the redemptive location of homosexual desire in history and the recuperation for our own time, through an understanding of its discursive embodiments, of that desire's changing imperatives and parameters."—Terence Hawkes, Times Literary Supplement

"The great strength of Bruce Smith's book is that it does not sidestep the complex challenge of engaging in the sexual politics of the present while attending to the resistant discourses and practices of Renaissance England. Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England demonstrates how a commitment to the present opens up our understanding of the past."—Peter Stallybrass, Shakespeare Quarterly

"A major contribution to the understanding of homosexuality in Renaissance England and by far the best and most comprehensive account yet offered of the homoeroticism that suffuses Renaissance literature."—Claude J. Summers, Journal of Homosexuality
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cover of I Write This to You: Sonnets

I Write This to You

Sonnets

Roger Armbrust

Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2022

Armbrust writes sonnets on a variety of themes, primarily addressed to his muse and his lovers. Since 1979 when his first book of poetry went to press he continues to write, as if he opens a vein to pour his own blood onto the page to do it.
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cover of Mending Torn Pages: Sonnets

Mending Torn Pages

Sonnets

Roger Armbrust

Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2021

Armbrust writes sonnets on a variety of themes, primarily addressed to his muse and his lovers. Since 1979, when his first book of poetry went to press, he continues to write, as if he opens a vein to pour his own blood onto the page to do it.
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cover of NAKED: Poems

NAKED

Poems

David Barber

Northwestern University Press, 2027

A moving and sonically stunning exploration into the body and soul

David Barber’s masterful new book, NAKED, is powered by prolific feats of verbal prowess. With formal dexterity, nerve, and ingenious wordplay, these poems grapple with the serious business of soulmaking. In a spacious collection that enacts changes on the touch-and-go of innocence and experience, these poems are rife with inklings and reckonings in the name of muscle memory and mortal longing. Here, Hollywood meets Babylon in the Garden of Earthly Delights; Odysseus opts for a username; the naked eye goes toe-to-toe with the naked truth; American sonnets & ampersands run wild. NAKED is an all-out lovers’ quarrel over the give-and-take of the spirit and flesh—and Barber is all in.

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cover of Poems While We Dream: Sonnets and Songs

Poems While We Dream

Sonnets and Songs

Roger Armbrust

Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2021

Armbrust writes sonnets on a variety of themes, primarily addressed to his muse and his lovers. Since 1979, when his first book of poetry went to press, he continues to write, as if he opens a vein to pour his own blood onto the page to do it.
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cover of Sonnets and Other Poems

Sonnets and Other Poems

Luis de Camões, Translated by Richard Zenith

Tagus Press, 2009

This revised and updated bilingual edition of Sonnets and Other Poems offers a cross-section of lyric poetry by Portugal's Luís de Camões, author of The Lusiads (1572), the great Renaissance epic memoralizing Vasco da Gama's inaugural voyage to India (1497-99). A selection of forty sonnets is followed by poems using other metrical patterns and rhyme schemes, including terza rima, ottava rima, the sestina, the canzone, and the redondilha, a verse form typical of Portuguese poetry. Richard Zenith's fluid renditions, far from attempting to "update" Camões, closely adhere to the original text, employing modern English but resisting the temptation to expand on the relatively small and simple lexicon of the Portuguese. Along with discussing his method of translation, Zenith's illuminating introduction shows how Camões's life and work were intimately entwined.

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cover of Sonnets and Selected Poems

Sonnets and Selected Poems

Antero de Quental, Edited by Onésimo T. Almeida and Mario Pereira

Tagus Press, 2022

Grappling with metaphysical questions of suffering, death, and infinity, Antero de Quental’s sonnets have been widely celebrated by writers and intellectuals around the world, with Fernando Pessoa calling him “one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century.” Irreverent and nonconformist,  Antero became the ideologue and moving spirit behind the group of progressive intellectuals known as the Generation of 1870 who rebelled against tradition and attempted to reverse Portugal’s intellectual stagnation. This is the first bilingual (Portuguese-English) edition of Antero's sonnets and poems, as well as the first to assemble the translations by Aubrey F. G. Bell, Roy Campbell, Richard Garnett, George Monteiro, S. Griswold Morley, Fernando Pessoa, Edgar Prestage, and Richard Zenith in a single volume.

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cover of Sonnets of Love and Death

Sonnets of Love and Death

Jean De Sponde

Northwestern University Press, 2001

This bilingual edition introduces readers to the sixteenth century poet Jean de Sponde, considered one of the most important poets of the Renaissance period and a precursor to Donne, in his poetry Sponde reflects the tensions–both stylistic and philosophical-of his time. This collection of sonnets, abounding in metaphor, paradox, antithesis, and hyperbole, is a restless personal exploration of the body and the spirit, of the concrete and the abstract, of passion and anguish.
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cover of Sonnets to Orpheus

Sonnets to Orpheus

Rainer Maria Rilke

University of Scranton Press, 2007

Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, first published in German in 1923, has been hailed by critics as some of the finest lyrical verse of the twentieth century. Rick Anthony Furtak’s translation of this legendary collection is the first edition for an English-speaking audience to situate the poems in a philosophical context, lending unexpected depth and a fresh perspective to Rilke’s magnum opus.
Furtak’s rich translations skillfully evoke the haunting, enigmatic nature of these poems that bridge the gap between the romantic and the modern, as his introduction guides the reader through the abundant mystical and spiritual insights to be found in Rilke’s sonnets. This new edition of a literary masterpiece will be essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophical implications of verse.
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cover of Such Is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets

Such Is My Love

A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets

Joseph Pequigney

University of Chicago Press, 1985

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cover of The Last Quiet Place on Earth: Sonnets in the Time of Coronavirus

The Last Quiet Place on Earth

Sonnets in the Time of Coronavirus

Roger Armbrust

Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2022

It’s 2020, the time of Coronavirus. The poet confronts it and his environment in these 104 sonnets. Armbrust writes sonnets on a variety of themes, primarily addressed to his muse and his lovers. Since 1979, when his first book of poetry went to press, he continues to write, as if he opens a vein to pour his own blood onto the page to do it.
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cover of The Sonnets of Rainer Maria Rilke

The Sonnets of Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke

St. Augustine's Press, 2021

Romano Guardini described Rainer Maria Rilke as the “poet who had things of such importance to say about the end of our own age [and] was also a prophet of things to come.” The complexity of Rilke is, then, “highly relevant to modern Man.” Decades after Guardini’s assessment, the reader who rediscovers Rilke will find a depth of mind and soul that display a profundity the post-modern reader only thinks he possesses. 

In an expanded collection of Rilke’s sonnets, Rick Anthony Furtak not only makes this lyrical masterpiece accessible to the English reader, but he proves himself a master of sorts as well. His introduction that elaborates on Rilke’s marriage of vision and voice, intention and enigma, haunted companionship and abandonment is a stand-alone marvel for the reader. Furtak’s praised translation of Sonnets to Orpheus (University of Chicago Press, 2008) is surpassed in this much broader collection of verse that also includes the original German text. It is Furtak’s great achievement that Rilke resonates with the contemporary reader, who uncertain and searching wants to believe that the vision of existence can mirror much more than his own consciousness. In his feat of rendering Rilke in English, contextualizing the philosophical meanings of verse, and presenting literary romanticism, Furtak provides a formidable contribution to the vindication of true poetic voice.
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cover of en el norte / soy del sur

en el norte / soy del sur

José Felipe Alvergue

Omnidawn, 2026

Poetry that considers migration and identity through formal experimentation with sonnets.
 
José Felipe Alvergue’s en el norte/soy del sur, which translates to “in the north I am of the south,” is an exploration into the limits of the American sonnet, one that seeks to establish a stable sense of place, while opening vistas at each turn. Stitching together multiple sonnets into what he calls “sonnet essays,” Alvergue rides their turns—or “voltas”—that are guided by memories and photographs of his family’s migratory history between El Salvador and the United States.
 
The resulting text is a story of human geography that considers the coordinates of a long, continuous thought about what it means to be “of a place” as a defining characteristic of identity, when one is also “in a place” that sets strict limits on the political and historical potential of im/migrants. A deeply human documentary work that delves into one family’s migration across the hemisphere, en el norte/soy del sur hopes to give shape to the collective and often amorphous history of migration in the face of narratives that peddle spectacularized distillation and essentialism.
 
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