My Garden of Sonnet

On the Sonnet If by dull rhymes our English must be chained And like Andromeda the Sonnet sweet Fettered in spite of painéd loveliness; Let us find out if we must be constrained Sandals more interwoven and complete To fit the naked foot of poesy; Let us inspect the lyre and weigh the stress Of every chord and see what may be gained By ear industrious and attention meet; Misers of sound and syllable no less Than Midas of his coinage let us be Jealous of dead leaves in the bay-wreath crown; So if we may not let the Muse be free She will be bound with garlands of her own. –John Keats The sonnet began in Italy sometime in the 14th century and except for an eclipse of a couple of centuries following the Renaissance it has retained its supreme glory as a unique poetic form used by almost every poet of distinction in the modern age right up to this day. The perennial charm of the sonnet has kept it going across the centuries. Indeed if there is anything like ‘pure poetry’ in an ideal form it manifests itself best in a sonnet. It remains singularly autonomous and unrivalled there – in the midst of all poetic modes : lyric song ode ballad epic; unique as a poetic mode with its sets of constraints that give it a classically perfect finished statuesque shape of perfection in beauty; almost like a female figure with all its softness suppleness its curves and swells. ‘My Garden of Sonnets’ is a fresh gathering a rich miscellanea culled from nearly a millennium of great sonnet ‘making’. Beginning with a history of the sonnet’s journey and giving introductory chapter essays and information about all the poets below their sonnets it accompanies the reader among all the glorious pathways and fountains of delightful verse even as the refreshing stroll meanders through some naïve and frolicsome ‘Shadow Sonnets’ by the compiler himself and then ends with an elucidatory guide to the craft of sonnet-making with a shor