Sonnet - Modern Sonnet

Modern Sonnet

With the advent of free verse, the sonnet was seen as somewhat old-fashioned and fell out of use for a time among some schools of poets. However, a number of modern poets, including Wilfred Owen, John Berryman, George Meredith, Edwin Morgan, Robert Frost, Rupert Brooke, George Sterling, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Federico García Lorca, E.E. Cummings, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Robert Lowell, Joan Brossa, Vikram Seth, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jan Kal, Ernest Hilbert, Kim Addonizio, and Seamus Heaney continued to use the form. Elizabeth Bishop's inverted "Sonnet" was one of her last poems. Ted Berrigan's book, THE SONNETS, is an arresting and curious take on the form. Paul Muldoon often experiments with 14 lines and sonnet rhymes, though without regular sonnet meter. The advent of the New Formalism movement in the United States has also contributed to contemporary interest in the sonnet. The sonnet sees its revival with the word sonnet. Concise and visual in effect, word sonnets are fourteen line poems, with one word per line. Frequently allusive and imagistic, they can also be irreverent and playful. The Canadian poet Seymour Mayne published a few collections of word sonnets, and is one of the chief innovators of the form.

Read more about this topic:  Sonnet

Famous quotes containing the words modern and/or sonnet:

    Grief that is dazed and speechless is out of fashion: the modern woman mourns her husband loudly and tells you the whole story of his death, which distresses her so much that she forgets not the slightest detail about it.
    —Jean De La Bruyère (1645–1696)

    Ye gentle souls, who dream of rural ease,
    Whom the smooth stream and smoother sonnet please;
    Go! if the peaceful cot your praises share,
    Go, look within, and ask if peace be there:
    If peace be his—that drooping weary sire,
    Of theirs, that offspring round their feeble fire,
    Or hers, that matron pale, whose trembling hand
    Turns on the wretched hearth th’ expiring brand.
    George Crabbe (1754–1832)