Re Helen Vincent, "I do think there is something peculiarly addictive for
a writer about organising their thoughts into fourteen lines of rhymed
(usually) iambic pentameter" and, in general, getting started:
On Cue
That boy is going to write a sonnet --
He's quite determined on it.
He's budgeted out his time
To bring it into rime.
Every line will tense and stress
With grace, dispatch, address.
The rime-words lock into their sockets:
Cue-balls englished, spinning to their pockets.
Do-Well's beginning, Do-Bet's begun:
By dint of doing will Best a thing be Done.
If words are facts, a poem's the case
When all the facts are falling into place.
Seven couplets square to five & fifty feet --
Quite, indeed, and quit. Set's complete.
On Thu, 7 Jun 2007 17:44:51 +0100
"Vincent, Helen" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> This is one of the many things I find fascinating about English printed
> sonnet sequences of the 1590s and after. One could argue that James
> Roberts, printer of Delia, Diella, Diana, and non-alliteratively
> Phillis, was as influential in creating the image of what a sonnet
> sequence should look like as any sonneteer. After all, for how many of
> these sequences do we possess holograph manuscripts? All the evidence I
> can think of (Daniel, Drayton, Greville, Robert Sidney) tends to suggest
> that English poets seem not to write sonnet *sequences*, with a
> teleological narrative in view, but sonnet *series*, revising their old
> sonnets, changing the order around, writing other kinds of lyrics on
> similar subjects. I do think there is something peculiarly addictive for
> a writer about organising their thoughts into fourteen lines of rhymed
> (usually) iambic pentameter. It so happens that at certain moments one
> particular order of these series is captured in print, or in a
> particular manuscript, and this order then achieves a certain authority
> through circulation, but I am very wary of ascribing to the authors the
> kind of concern with the structure of their sequences that one finds in,
> for instance, Spenser's letter to Ralegh about the Faerie Queene.
>
> The Amoretti, as published, are of course an exception to this. But then
> the final book does look different to the usual 1590s sonnet sequences,
> even in format if I recall correctly. I have more problems with the 1609
> Shakespeare sonnets: I remember poring over the copy in the Bodleian
> library, trying to work out if I thought it looked different to other
> sequences simply because I had to jump through so many administrative
> hoops to look at it, or if there really was a perceivable difference in
> the presentation of the poems on the page. I think there is but have
> never been able to articulate it properly.
>
> Oh, on the Psalms: could any English writer in early modern England
> produce a lyric sequence *without* having David lurking somewhere in his
> or her consciousness?
>
> Helen
>
> Helen Vincent
> Senior Curator
> Rare Book Collections
>
> Tel: +44 (0) 131 623 3894
>Fax: +44 (0) 131 623 3888
> Email: [log in to unmask]
>
> National Library of Scotland
> George IV Bridge
> Edinburgh
> EH1 1EW
> Scotland
>
>
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List
>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Marshall Grossman
>> Sent: 07 June 2007 17:16
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: Amoretti and Sonnets
>>
>> A literary historical point could be made: although we are
>> unlikely to know definitively what Shakespeare's role was in
>> putting the sonnets into the shape they now have, we do know
>> that Thorpe's 1609 quarto is the book that entered literary
>> history and has, for all these years, been assimilated by it.
>> With that I venture a formal argument that Q is a very good
>> book, that the poems are clearly ordered in a way that yields
>> narrative, that "The Lover's Complaint" makes good sense
>> where it is (as Duncan-Jones and others have argued) and that
>> the sonnets--as we might read them in Q--track very nicely
>> with preoccupations we find in the plays (e. g. 20 and
>> Twelfth Night, 94 and Measure for Measure, 138 and just about
>> every everything he ever writ.) So, even, if we were to add,
>> "as compiled by J. Thorpe" to the author line, we'd still have a book.
>>
>> Marshall Grossman
>> Professor
>> Department of English
>> University of Maryland
>> College Park, MD 20895
>>
>> 301-405-9651
>> [log in to unmask]
>>
>
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James Nohrnberg
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