The Penguin Book of the Sonnet

The Penguin Book of the Sonnet

500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English

About the Book

A unique anthology celebrating that most vigorous of literary forms--the sonnet

The sonnet is one of the oldest and most enduring literary forms of the post-classical world, a meeting place of image and voice, passion and reason, elegy and ode. It is a form that both challenges and liberates the poet.

For this anthology, poet and scholar Phillis Levin has gathered more than 600 sonnets to tell the full story of the sonnet tradition in the English language. She begins with its Italian origins; takes the reader through its multifaceted development from the Elizabethan era to the Romantic and Victorian; demonstrates its popularity as a vehicle of protest among writers of the Harlem Renaissance and poets who served in the First World War; and explores its revival among modern and contemporary poets. In her vibrant introduction, Levin traces this history, discussing characteristic structures and shifting themes and providing illuminating readings of individual sonnets. She includes an appendix on structure, biographical notes, and valuable explanatory notes and indexes. And, through her narrative and wide-ranging selection of sonnets and sonnet sequences, she portrays not only the evolution of the form over half a millennium but also its dynamic possibilities.

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About the Author

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The improbable life story of Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) included a peculiarly gothic childhood in Ireland during which he was successively abandoned by his mother, his father and his guardian; two decades in the United States, where he worked as a journalist and was sacked for marrying a former slave; and a long period in Japan, where he married a Japanese woman and wrote about Japanese society and aesthetics for a Western readership. His ghost stories, which were drawn from Japanese folklore and influenced by Buddhist beliefs, appeared in collections throughout the 1890s and 1900s. He is a much celebrated figure in Japan. More by Various
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About the Author

Phillis Levin
Phillis Levin is the author of Mr. Memory & Other Poems, Temples and Fields, The Afterimage, Mercury, and May Day, and editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. She has received the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar Award, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, a Bogliasco Fellowship, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Widely anthologized, her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Paris Review, The Atlantic, Poetry London, Southwest Review, Yale Review, Agni, Kenyon Review, and The Best American Poetry. She teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at Hofstra University and resides in New York. More by Phillis Levin
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