Holy Sonnets - Quotations and Adaptations

Quotations and Adaptations

• Nine of the sonnets were set to music for tenor and piano by Benjamin Britten in August 1945.
• The lines "Death, be not proud, though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so" (HS 10) are often quoted—as, for example, in Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize–winning play, Wit (1995), and the movie of the same name.
• The first line of HS 14, beginning "Batter my heart three-personed God", are cited by such artists as Hendrik Hofmeyr and in such productions as John Adams's opera Doctor Atomic.
• The first nuclear weapon test, Trinity was named by J. Robert Oppenheimer after some extracts of the Holy Sonnets.