The Art of the Sonnet

Dates indicate first book publication, except where otherwise noted.

• How To Use These Sonnets
• Introduction
• “Whoso list to hunt” • Thomas Wyatt (1557)
• “Norfolk sprang thee” • Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1557)
• “That self same tongue” • George Gascoigne (1573)
• Astrophel and Stella 45 • Sir Philip Sidney (written 1582)
• Ruines of Rome 3 • Edmund Spenser, original by Joachim du Bellay (1591)
• Delia 38 • Samuel Daniel (1592)
• Amoretti 78 • Edmund Spenser (1595)
• Caelica 7 • Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (probably written 1590s)
• Sonnet 2 • William Shakespeare (1609)
• Sonnet 68 • William Shakespeare (1609)
• Sonnet 116 • William Shakespeare (1609)
• Pamphilia to Amphilanthus 46 • Lady Mary Wroth (1621)
• “At the round earth’s imagined corners” • John Donne (probably written 1615–1633)
• “Oh, to vex me, contraries meet in one” • John Donne (probably written 1615–1633)
• “Redemption” • George Herbert (1633)
• “Prayer (I)” • George Herbert (1633)
• “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” • John Milton (1673)
• “Methought I saw my late espousèd saint” • John Milton (1673)
• Sappho and Phaon 24 • Mary Robinson (1796)
• “Huge vapours brood above the clifted shore” • Charlotte Smith (1798)
• “London, 1802” • William Wordsworth (1802)
• “Surprised by Joy” • William Wordsworth (1815)
• “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” • John Keats (1817)
• “Four seasons fill the measure of the year” • John Keats (1818)
• “Ozymandias” • Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818)
• “England in 1819” • Percy Bysshe Shelley (written 1819–1820)
• “Work without Hope” • Samuel Taylor Coleridge (written 1825)
• “Swordy Well” • John Clare (probably written 1820s)
• “Mysterious Night” • Joseph Blanco White (written 1827)
• “To-morrow” • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, original by Lope de Vega (1833)
• “The Fish, the Man, and the Spirit” • Leigh Hunt (1836)
• “The Columbine” • Jones Very (1839)
• “Written in Emerson’s Essays” • Matthew Arnold (written 1844)
• Sonnets from the Portuguese 28 • Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1850)
• Sonnets, Third Series 6 • Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (written before 1873)
• “Retreat” • Charles Baudelaire (translated by Rachel Hadas) (1861)
• Modern Love 50 • George Meredith (1862)
• “A Dream” • Charles Tennyson Turner (1864)
• “I know not why, but all this weary day” • Henry Timrod (1867)
• “Renouncement” • Alice Meynell (written 1869)
• Brother and Sister 7 and 8 • George Eliot (written before 1870)
• “For a Venetian Pastoral” • Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1870)
• “A Superscription” • Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1870)
• “The Cross of Snow” • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (written 1879)
• Later Life 17 • Christina Rossetti (1881)
• “The New Colossus” • Emma Lazarus (1883)
• “As kingfishers catch fire” • Gerard Manley Hopkins (written 1883)
• “Thou art indeed just” • Gerard Manley Hopkins (written 1889)
• “Mt. Lykaion” • Trumbull Stickney (1905)
• “Nests in Elms” • Michael Field (1908)
• “Archaic Torso of Apollo” • Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Edward Snow) (1908)
• “A Church Romance” • Thomas Hardy (1909)
• “Mowing” • Robert Frost (1913)
• “Bluebeard” • Edna St. Vincent Millay (1917)
• “Firelight” • Edwin Arlington Robinson (1921)
• “America” • Claude McKay (1921)
• “Self-Portrait” • Elinor Wylie (1922)
• “On Somme” • Ivor Gurney (written 1922)
• “Nomad Exquisite” • Wallace Stevens (1923)
• “Leda and the Swan” • William Butler Yeats (1924)
• “To Emily Dickinson” • Hart Crane (written 1926)
• “At the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem” • Countee Cullen (1927)
• “The Castle of Thorns” • Yvor Winters (1930)
• “No Swan So Fine” • Marianne Moore (1932)
• “Single Sonnet” • Louise Bogan (1937)
• In Time of War 27 • W.H. Auden (1938)
• “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same” • Robert Frost (1948)
• “Epic” • Patrick Kavanagh (1951)
• “The Illiterate” • William Meredith (1958)
• “Marsyas” • James Merrill (1959)
• The Sonnets 44 • Ted Berrigan (1964)
• “To a Winter Squirrel” • Gwendolyn Brooks (1965)
• “Paradise Saved” • A.D. Hope (1967)
• Autumn Testament 27 • James K. Baxter (1971)
• “Staring at the Sea on the Day of the Death of Another” • May Swenson (1972)
• “Searching” • Robert Lowell (1968; revised 1973)
• “The Morning Moon” • Derek Walcott (1976)
• “National Trust” • Tony Harrison (1978)
• “Sonnet” • Elizabeth Bishop (1979)
• An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England 7 • Geoffrey Hill (1979)
• Glanmore Sonnets 1 • Seamus Heaney (1979; revised 1998)
• “The Cormorant in Its Element” • Amy Clampitt (1983)
• “Man Walking to Work” • Denis Johnson (1987)
• “Jacob” • Edgar Bowers (1990)
• “Strangler Fig” • Les Murray (1992)
• Mythologies 3 • A.K. Ramanujan (written before 1993)
• “Into the Black” • John Hollander (1993)
• “Necrophiliac” • Rosanna Warren (1993)
• “Party Dress for a First Born” • Rita Dove (1995)
• “in winter” • Michele Leggott (1999)
• Voiced Stops 1 • Forrest Gander (2001)
• Radial Symmetry 3 • Tony Lopez (2003)
• “Flirrup” • Mary Dalton (2003)
• “Homework. Write a Sonnet. About Love?” • Alison Brackenbury (2004)
• “Physicism” • Lucie Brock-Broido (2004)
• “Zion” • Donald Revell (2005)
• “Starlings, Broad Street, Trenton, 2003” • Paul Muldoon (2006)
• “Psalm at High Tide” • Martha Serpas (2007)
• “Rest Stop near the Italian Border” • Rafael Campo (2007)
• “corydon & alexis, redux” • D.A. Powell (2009)
• Editions Used
• Further Reading
• Acknowledgments
• Credits
• Index