Sonnet 18

“Scorn not the Sonnet,” by William Wordsworth

Wordsworth’s address to critics who have scorned or diminished the value of the sonnet takes the reader through its formal history by alluding to those who have contributed the most memorable lines of verse—Petrarch and Shakespeare; Italian poet Torquato Tasso; Portugal’s greatest poet, Luïs de Camões (here “Camöens”); and English poets Edmund Spenser and John Milton. Like Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton elevated the form by experimenting with it. Dante Alighieri—of The Inferno notoriety—is mentioned to illustrate how his work in terza rima offered the formal basis from which the sonnet could form. The sonnet, in the speaker’s view, is not a form to be discarded; instead, he wishes that there were more of them.

Wordsworth’s poem is 14 lines but uses the abba rhyme scheme in the first eight lines, followed by efef and ending, like the Elizabethan sonnet, with a pithy couplet. Its sentiment is consistent with Wordsworth’s philosophy about poetry in the Romantic tradition—that is, it pays homage to the ways poetry can reveal something about a person’s inner life. 

“House,” by Robert Browning

Browning’s poem eschews the message in Wordsworth by pointing out how poetry—and the sonnet, in particular—became an industry indulging not only in the narcissism of poets but also the tendency to confuse the speakers in poems with the poets themselves. “House” is a series of quatrains in abab rhyme and references Wordsworth’s poem in the first quatrain when the speaker offers to unlock his heart “with a sonnet-key” (Line 4). 

Critical Essays

1. Bates, Ernest Sutherland. “The Sincerity of Shakespeare's       Sonnets.” Modern Philology, vol. 8, no. 1, 1910, pp. 87–106., www.jstor.org/stable/432499. Accessed 23 Dec. 2020.

2. Matz, Robert. “The Scandals of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” ELH, vol. 77, no. 2, 2010, pp. 477–508. JSTOR,   

www.jstor.org/stable/40664640. Accessed 23 Dec. 2020.