Before Shakespeare there were sonnets. These 'court' poems cast women's ownership - as slave justification. Worse than any modern day configuration of selling off a daughter to marry a son, they were 'shopping lists' on high: proposal, reason, acceptance (look at the sonnet's form).
Brilliantly, Shakespeare utterly transformed the sonnet, whereby there might be love: proposal? reason? acceptance?
Wilfred Owen brilliantly turned the sonnet inside out and, in my view, killed it.
My problem with the sonnet today is that its form, this previously aristocratic structure, is now an accepted intellectual deceit.
Did Brecht write sonnets? Did Andre Breton write sonnets?
Why oh why the sonnet among you today?
Rupert x
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