Overview

Phillis Levin | Craft Seminar: The Sonnet

This craft seminar explores the life of an enduring lyric form. Through the lens of the sonnet, we encounter patterns that evolved over time and consider how an underlying structure can spur a poem’s development and intensify its expressive power. The sonnets we discuss will encompass a range of motifs, from platonic and erotic love to religious devotion and spiritual struggle, from personal transformation to social protest. We read and recite sonnets from the Renaissance to the Romantic and Victorian era, from the Harlem Renaissance and the Great War to the present day, including work by Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Philip Sidney, Lady Mary Wroth, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Hopkins, Frost, Millay, Owen, Cummings, Hayden, Berryman, Brooks, and Heaney. The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English (2001), edited and introduced by Phillis Levin, will be our main source, supplemented by contemporary sonnets and sonnet sequences by Henri Cole, Terrance Hayes, Tyehimba Jess, Paul Muldoon, Marilyn Nelson, Molly Peacock, Diane Seuss, and Natasha Trethewey. Students are welcome to experiment with patterns and strategies they find engaging.