Michael Robbins

Of course I think of Keats’s “misers of sound and syllable” and D. G. Rossetti’s “moment’s monument,” which suggest that it is the tension of the form that attracts poets—miserly and momentary yet monumental and garlanded. From Thomas Wyatt to Bernadette Mayer, the sonnet in English has almost no fixed rules, just tendencies. Think of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s curtal sonnets or the not-quite-sonnets of The Dream Songs or Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets. The sonnet is as adaptable as capitalism. As for whether it has a particular politics, you can get graduate students to believe anything, but no. However, I should note that Anahid Nersessian, in her recent Utopia, Limited, has a fascinating reading of Wordsworth’s sonnets, whose “scanty plot of ground” frees him from “the weight of too much liberty.” She argues they mirror our own political and ecological situation in their play of constraint and liberation—it is precisely through constraint (on production, on consumption) that we must now seek liberation.