The English Sonnet II
Scope: This lecture continues our investigation of the growth of the sonnet as a genre, discussing what innovations in form, language, and subject matter are made by Shakespeare's contemporary, John Donne, and then by Milton later in the seventeenth century. The eighteenth century was not a time for sonnet writing, so we jump to the nineteenth century to Wordsworth, who (an interesting fact) wrote more sonnets than any other major English poet (including his Ecclesiastical Sonnets, a history of the Church of England in sonnet form!), and to Shelley, whose few sonnets are extraordinarily rich and dense expansions of the form's limits.
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