Scanty Plot of Ground

In the introduction to his selection of some of the greatest sonnets ever written, Paul Muldoon reminds us that ‘of the innumerable traditional verse forms, the sonnet is not only the most persistent but also the most pervasive’. He suggests that ‘part of the reason for the durability of the sonnet is its very duration’. It’s the perfect length for what Dante Gabriel Rossetti described as ‘a moment’s monument’, or Edna St. Vincent Millay as putting ‘chaos into fourteen lines’. Among the diverting and diverse poets represented here are Elizabeth Bishop, Wanda Coleman, John Donne, Terrance Hayes, John Keats, Claude McKay, Christina Rossetti, William Shakespeare, Patricia Smith, William Wordsworth, and W.B. Yeats.