A Century of Sonnets

This text presents the broad and rich context of Romantic sonnets such as John Keats's "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" and William Wordsworth's "Composed upon Westminster Bridge" by tracing the sonnet revival in England from its beginning to its culmination.

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A Century of Sonnets is a striking reminder of that some of the best known and most well-respected poems of the Romantic era were sonnets. It presents the broad and rich context of such favourites as Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias," John Keats's "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" and William Wordsworth's "Composed upon Westminster Bridge" by tracing the sonnet revival in England from its beginning in the hands of Thomas Edwards and Charlotte Smith to its culmination in the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. This volume is the first in modern times to collect such sonnets, many never published before in the twentieth century, and contains nearly five hundred examples composed between 1750 and 1850 by 81 poets, nearly half of them women.