Fourteen English sonnets

The sonnet has been called “that most taxing of sprints in the athletics of poetry” (Charles Causley) and “the best known and most versatile of the free-standing verse-forms, alive and well after over 450 years of life in English” (John Fuller). Should these statements be true (sonneteers at least would hardly feel tempted to refute them), it is astonishing that never before has there been a collection of interpretations of English sonnets from Shakespeare to our time. This volume is designed to compensate for this neglect and to convince the reader of the bustling variety of the genre by discussing fourteen of the best English sonnets by Shakespeare (Raimund Borgmeier), John Donne (John Carey), John Milton (Michael R. G. Spiller), William Wordsworth (Stephen Gill), Percy Bysshe Shelley (Michael Ferber), John Keats (Rudolf Sühnel), Christina Rossetti (Diane D’Amico), Gerard Manley Hopkins (J. R. Watson), W. B. Yeats (Nicholas Meihuizen), Roy Campbell (Rowland Smith), W. H. Auden (Stan Smith), George Barker (Robert Fraser), Charles Causley (Michael Hanke), and Philip Larkin (James Booth).