Great Sonnets (Dover Thrift Editions)
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Book Summary Information
Editor: Paul NegriEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1994-08-23
ISBN: 0486280527
Number of pages: 112
Publisher: Dover Publications
Book Reviews of Great Sonnets (Dover Thrift Editions)
Book Review: Great Bathtub Reading
Summary: 5 Stars
Bertie Wooster can sing the latest Broadway melody while he scrub brushes his back, but I prefer reading poetry aloud in my acoustically-correct, ceramic-tiled bath. And I've discovered the perfect book for it: Dover's Thrift Edition of Great Sonnets.
It is from this small volume that I've learned that the world is charged with the grandeur of God ("God's Grandeur," Hopkins), that lust in action is a waste of shame ("Th' Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame," Shakespeare), and that listening to my lover's breathing while pillowed upon her breast beats looking at that lone, cold, bright and steadfast star any old day ("Bright Star," Keats).
And that's not all. This thin volume of sonnets is chock-full of other such keen observations.
For example, how does Wordsworth ("Surprised by Joy") manage to convey so economically that fleeting feeling of joy accidentally experienced by a man mourning the death of a loved one, that is immediately followed by his feeling of guilt for having felt it, which makes us feel how quickly times passes?
How does Archibald MacLeish reduce a cataclysmic event as large as the end of the world into so few choice words that when the circus big top blows off you feel as if the top of your head has blown off with it? ("The End of the World")
How can someone say so much in so few lines and so few words? Fourteen lines to be exact, with five strong beats or stresses per line-no more and no less-and a very exacting rhyme scheme. I don't know. I'm usually given to such wordiness that it would take me a warehouse the size of a state university filled with three-ring binders to tell you, and I still couldn't begin to touch the truth of it. However, that poets can do it never ceases to astonish me.
What's more, should my dog-eared Dover thrift edition ever fall by accident into the tub, I can cheaply replace it.
Summary of Great Sonnets (Dover Thrift Editions)
Treasury of over 170 English and American sonnets by more than 70 poets, from the Renaissance to the 20th century. Shakespeare's "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?", Milton's "On His Blindness," Wordsworth's "The World Is Too Much with Us," many more by Spenser, Sidney, Blake, Byron, Coleridge, Longfellow, Yeats, Frost, Poe, etc.
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