American poetry as it first took shape, in the poems of Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet, was mainly devotional in character; and though it shifted in the eighteenth century to the satirical mode, and in the nineteenth to a secular subject matter, it did not quickly free itself of English models or find a music of its own. Yet American poets from the first had an unearned bounty, a trove of fresh materials – a gift so omnipresent that we sometimes forget to think of it. Here, in the landscape, were strange memorials of "the mound-builders vanished from the earth," as William Cullen Bryant recalled in "The Prairie"; in the sky were the big clouds and dragging mists that enchanted Henry David Thoreau – "Dew-cloth, dream drapery, / And napkin spread by fays; / Drifting meadow of the air." Here, too, were the familiar appearances Winfield Townley Scott thought Americans should make more of; for "It is so much easier to forget than to have been Mr. Whittier,"

To stand suddenly struck with wonder of old legends in a
    young land,
To look up at last and see poetry driving a buckboard around
    the bend,
And poetry all the time in the jays screeching at the cats in
    the dooryard.

The opportunities were here, Scott's lines tell us, but it took two hundred years of American living for the poets to stand up and notice. By then, Emerson had prophesied a task for poetry beyond description and chronicle. He did it in his essay "The Poet," which freely scatters obiter dicta and imperatives that look far ahead to modernist practice. In this essay we read, for example, that "the man is only half himself, the other half is his expression"; that "it is not meters, but a meter-making argument that makes a poem"; that "poems are a corrupt version of some text in nature with which they ought to be made to tally"; that when a poet recovers the truths of nature through imagination, "the meaner the type by which a law is expressed, the more pungent it is, and the more lasting in the memories of men." When poets have realized all this, they will have begun to justify the sacred calling that Emerson bestows on them: "Poets are thus liberating gods." Emerson spoke his thought again, in a manner just as oracular, in the didactic poem "Merlin," whose hero is instructed not to please by the harmonies of the "trivial harp" but rather to "smite the chords rudely and hard, / As with hammer or with mace," and "mount to paradise / By the stairway of surprise." This prophecy – with its suggestion that meters ought to be bracing, irregular, impassioned – would be fulfilled by Walt Whitman in "Song of Myself."

But where does that leave the sonnet? If Emerson were altogether right, there could not be enough American sonnets to make a topic for an essay. He was, I think, half right. American poets have prized invention above all other qualities; but to the poet of original genius, form is an irrepressible motive to invention. The sonnet is indeed the most settled and traditional of forms. Yet there have been so many good and memorable sonnets by Americans that F. O. Matthiessen, the editor of the great Oxford Book of American Verse, confessed one of his leading principles in choosing poems for that anthology had been "not too many sonnets." When Americans turn to this form, they invest it with a glamour and an intensity equal to anything they have to show in more flamboyant or new-minted frames. Relish of the challenge of sonnet-writing, however, seems to have been a late-nineteenth- and a twentieth-century phenomenon. You may judge how little it was expected by looking at a sonnet written in despair of sonnets:

Oh for a poet – for a beacon bright
To rift this changeless glimmer of dead gray;
To spirit back the Muses, long astray,
And flush Parnassus with a newer light;
To put these little sonnet-men to flight
Who fashion, in a shrewd mechanic way,
Songs without souls, that flicker for a day,
To vanish in irrevocable night.

What does it mean, this barren age of ours?
Here are the men, the women, and the flowers,
The seasons, and the sunset, as before.
What does it mean? Shall there not one arise
To wrench one banner from the western skies,
And mark it with his name forevermore?

The gesture that Edwin Arlington Robinson makes in this poem – his call upon an ancient power to assert the truth of genius in a new setting – is part of the established domain of the sonnet as a form. Robinson is doing here what William Wordsworth did when he exclaimed in one of his Sonnets on Liberty, "Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour." The appeal to a brave original makes an inviolable protest against dead forms – against "the tradition of a fact, the convention of a moral, the straw of last year's harvest," as Robert Browning called them in his "Essay on Shelley." The penultimate line of Robinson's sonnet shows how deeply the same aspiration is linked to a motive of his major work: those "western skies" will become his signature in poems from "The Dark Hills" to "The Man Against the Sky." Yet this sonnet against the sonnet-men is not just invective. It is a poem, and it sings, without the seduction of conscious felicity. It sings, even if Robinson's only adjustment of the form to his purpose occurs in the scheme of the sestet: the last rhyme is deferred as beauty wrung from the drabness of custom. By the end we recognize that this poem is no more a complaint against the sonnet as such than it is a complaint against the sunset. We need the eyes of art to look at society and nature unfettered by habit; that is the power that Robinson would summon again. Poetry in this sense does not tell us how to live; it tells what our living has been while we were looking away. "Here are the men, the women, and the flowers" – just to admit that they are seems a better start for poetry than the "changeless glimmer of dead gray" that comes from imitating other people's imaginative furnishings. The interest of this poem is now in part historical, since Robinson himself performed what he promised: he looked at the men, the women, and the flowers, in major poems that happen to be sonnets, such as "George Crabbe," with its concluding pledge "To consecrate the flicker not the flame."

The American whose name is most identified with the sonnet is Robert Frost. His predecessors, Wordsworth and Keats, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins, found in the form a characteristic music, but Frost is the author of the best sonnets in English written by anyone who was not Shakespeare. We can never say why; let us try to see how. In tone and theme, "The Silken Tent" has something in common with "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" But there is a difference in its singleness of gesture, an attentiveness that flows into every line and that refuses division into couplet or stanza.

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when a sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To everything on earth the compass round,
And only by one's going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

He does it all in a sentence, and this is essential to the figure the poem makes. A well-pitched tent like a beautiful and poised body holds its definition whatever the stimuli that press in and distort. Frost works a lovely change here on a celebrated image of sensuous responsiveness from John Donne's poem for Elizabeth Drury – "her pure, and eloquent blood, / Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought, / That one might almost say, her body thought." Singleness of balance argues singleness of mind – loosely bound, and going taut at the point where sinew or tendon will hold it steady. As a tent moves without pressure when the sun has dried its ropes, so the woman of this poem moves when awakened by some comparable element. What would that be? Maybe the warmth of the poet himself; or maybe the elements of a day – a tremor caused by a light wind, or something someone said. What a number of words in this sonnet unerringly prove their rightness for both parts of the metaphor. Let us look at three: "sureness," "capriciousness," and "cord" – the last for a rope but also (by a short stretch for the eye and none for the ear) a chord in music that creates a harmony by which different strains are blended. I have mentioned Donne, but a nearer inspiration of Frost's central idea is a passage in an early poem by Keats, "I stood Tip-toe." When, in Keats's vision of antique beauty, men and maidens have returned from sickness to each other's adoring eyes, nothing needs to be said: "But the soft numbers, in that moment spoken, / Made silken ties, that never may be broken." Frost's declaration of faith comes close to an idea vivid elsewhere in Keats: that the senses teach us to value sensation first in itself, and only later as evidence of something beyond itself. "The Silken Tent" is the sonnet of a lover, caught in a moment of physical admiration, a feeling that goes out from and comes back to the physical body. We know the passion of this poem the more for its suppression of the first-person singular.

"The Silken Tent" speaks of a love of life for its own sake. Let us turn to a sonnet about death; or rather about that death-in-life which the most fearful and thoughtful New England Saints brooded on in diaries and sermons. Jones Very composed his sonnet "The Dead," just as Frost wrote "The Silken Tent," around a metaphor compressed to a sentence.

I see them crowd on crowd they walk the earth
Dry, leafless trees no Autumn wind laid bare;
And in their nakedness find cause for mirth,
And all unclad would winter's rudeness dare;
No sap doth through their clattring branches flow,
Whence springing leaves and blossoms bright appear;
Their hearts the living God have ceased to know,
Who gives the spring time to th'expectant year;
They mimic life, as if from him to steal
His glow of health to paint the livid cheek;
They borrow words for thoughts they cannot feel,
That with a seeming heart their tongue may speak;
    And in their show of life more dead they live
    Than those that to the earth with many tears they give.

The final couplet has the sharpness and the stringency of utter belief. In the case of Very, a disciple of Emerson's who turned from Unitarianism to a severer faith, the belief arose from a contrast between the false face and hypocrisy of those who aim to please God by works, and the grace of those to whom divine election comes unbidden. We are to imagine the saved, in this poem, by the unforgiving portrait that Very offers of their opposites. His aesthetic criticism has the force of a moral condemnation, and we have seen this happen before: Robinson's little men "who fashion, in a shrewd mechanic way, / Songs without souls" are really no different from Very's sapless souls with "clattring branches," who "borrow words for thoughts they cannot feel" This is a harsh poem, whose power belongs as much perhaps to eloquence as to poetry; it has much of the early New England spirit, unconciliatory and incapable of wheedling. Very's figures and his phrasing come straight from the Bible: "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness." Echoes of Matthew 24:27 and many other verses are woven into the sonnet and refined until they signify an inward discipline.

Jones Very was the tutor at Harvard of another remarkable poet, Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, who lived near Amherst all his life and wrote five sonnet sequences between 1854 and 1872. Tuckerman, as the dates may suggest, was an exact contemporary of Emily Dickinson, and his poems like hers are expressive of intense solitude – a solitude that was chosen not irritably, not therapeutically, but forever and in principle. Dickinson's sense of isolation could be heightened or, or to use her own word, exhilarated to a pitch of ecstasy. No poet or saint has been surer or had less need of confirmation that she was one of the elect. By contrast, Tuckerman's poems are the testament of a lonely man whose loneliness is accepted as a condition of life. In reading all his poems, we are conscious of the recessive instincts of someone who lives in memory; yet the natural world, of which he is a born observer, makes a constant counterpoint to his reverie. Also, there are pieces of society he has cared for, the house for example where two beautiful sisters lived, to whom he devotes a separate group of sonnets. This is the great house whose windowpanes – an emblem of memory – he can hear falling "part by part" into the grassy stones below. Very few writers before Tuckerman qualify as poets of nature in the pure and unabstracting manner he exemplifies. John Clare sometimes wrote this way, in his shorter lyrics and in verse-rambles where he tagged the sights and sounds with a phrase for each; two generations earlier, in the late eighteenth century, William Lisle Bowles had used the sonnet as a variable frame for sheer description; and Tuckerman has something of their assurance, accuracy, and aesthetic continence. Yet there is in his poetry, as Nathaniel Hawthorne observed, a poignancy hidden by the subject matter, a pulse of strong emotion always shy of saying too much.

Thin little leaves of wood fern, ribbed and toothed,
Long curved sail needles of the green pitch pine,
With common sand grass, skirt the horizon line,
And over these the incorruptible blue!
Here let me gently lie and softly view
All world asperities, lightly touched and smoothed
As by his gracious hand, the great Bestower.
What though the year be late? some colors run
Yet through the dry, some links of melody.
Still let me be, by such, assuaged and soothed
And happier made, as when, our schoolday done,
We hunted on from flower to frosty flower,
Tattered and dim, the last red butterfly,
Or the old grasshopper molasses-mouthed.

You see him sitting down, stretched on the grass, and touched to observation by a certain composure of the landscape. The octave and sestet here are nicely interwoven by the rhyme of a natural thing with a metaphysical entity, "flower" and "Bestower": the unremarkable ease of the pair suits the decorum. But those "links of melody" are what anyone will remember this poem for – a synaesthetic metaphor for the red and yellow and brown of the trees in autumn, against the background of gray and dark green. Notice, too, the marvelous closing image that likewise draws on more than one of the senses, the clicking from stem to stem of the old grasshopper, "molasses-mouthed." Autumn, as we know from his other poems, was Tuckerman's favorite season, and the mixture of elegy is almost conventional in such a mood and setting, but in this sonnet every touch has been felt before being rendered. He wrote more than a dozen sonnets as sharply realized as this – somber pictures of an integral life, within vantage of "the incorruptible blue."

Léonie Adams's "Alas, Kind Element!" is a sonnet of spring that finds an erotic undercurrent in the word alas.

Then I was sealed, and like the wintering tree
I stood me locked upon a summer core;
Living, had died a death, and asked no more.
And I lived then, but as enduringly,
And my heart beat, but only as to be.
Ill weathers well, hail, gust and cold I bore,
I held my life as hid, at root, in store:
Thus I lived then, till this air breathed on me.
Till this kind air breathed kindness everywhere,
There where my times had left me I would stay.
Then I was staunch, I knew nor yes nor no;
But now the wishful leaves have thronged the air.
My every leaf leans forth upon the day;
Alas, kind element! which comes to go.

The work of a young poet of the 1920s, this sonnet has an idiom that feels archaic because it presses modern words to the limit of their available senses. Adams writes about love as physically as Frost did in "The Silken Tent," but she has a second subject, imagination, and the poem is precise in its capture of a compound feeling: the trap of self-sufficiency, and the regret that comes with its surrender. The words "seal," "locked," "core," and "staunch," are perfectly chosen and placed, as is the repetition of "then" and of its neighbor "there." The first several times I read this poem, it seemed to me that the end required a clinching couplet that had gone missing: it was hard to be offered the long sound of the final word "go" without an immediate rhyme to match. I no longer think this a weakness. The sense of the words is that the moment of rebirth stole away unheralded, just as it came. It is natural for the poem to end that way as well.

The things we love earliest in the arts are often the things we love best. Tasteful readers may try to forget E. E. Cummings, but there is no escaping him. Sentimentality and sarcasm, panegyric and parody, jostle so closely in his poetry that sometimes only a title, a limping or short-footed line, a curl of the lip or a turn of phrase will let you know for sure that a poem has been not pious but mocking from the start. There is a good and fairly typical love-and-sex sonnet, for example, that signals its irony only with a space before the drop-down closing line:

lady through whose profound and fragile lips
the sweet small clumsy feet of April came

into the ragged meadow of my soul.

Most readers are aware that while Cummings was writing anti-Petrarchan sonnets, on the model of "My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun," he was also writing the usual sonnets of rapturous homage to a gracious lady. What is less well known, because the effects are confined to juvenilia, is that before he wrote the anti-patriotic satires and causeries on which his fame mostly rests, Cummings had written hand-on-heart patriotic hymns, in chiming impeccable stanzas, poems of the sort perpetually in demand for use on American children. He wrote them as a child himself, and there is no point in quoting. It is enough to know that a firsthand immersion in bombast, suitable for scouting the terrain, went further in his case and left the poet thoroughly soaked in balderdash. No smaller exposure could have produced the undivided gusto of this travesty:

"next to of course god america I
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn's early my
country 'tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water.

When Dr. Johnson said that patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel, he meant not that patriots tend to be scoundrels but, rather, that a scoundrel will always use patriotism as a convenient mask when his other disguises have grown penetrable. The specialty of the patriot-scoundrel, in his militant phase, is a morale that turns public-mindedness into a running faucet of the emotions, hot for generous fervor, cold for bigoted contempt. This poem moves with a cunning alternation of tones between logical-rhetorical ballast ("of course," "what of it?"), remembered snatches of songs and slogans ("oh say can you see by the dawn's early"), and a broth of random phraseology ladled up from the timeless clichés of commemoration ("those heroic happy dead / who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter"). The method employed here, of dipping into a private consciousness that turns out to harbor nothing but general-consumption platitudes, may owe something to Ulysses – a year or two in print when Cummings wrote this sonnet. The same technique would be claimed by John Dos Passos in USA, and by Hart Crane in the opening lines of "The River," where an unamalgamating medley of voices is overheard, each taking its cue from the last. Crane will make us hear those words as if on the radio, drifting from station to station, but in Cummings's poem the channels are in the speaker's head, competing, clashing, and most shamelessly harmonizing. The speaker's temperature has gone up considerably by the end. Hence the glass of water. This is a parody, no doubt, and its motive is satirical; but does it not, like so much parody and satire, partly love the thing it hates? Cummings's redneck Rotarian blunderbuss of an orator is good enough to make America worth taking a picture of.

I turn now to an experimental sonnet of a slightly later period, "Father" by John Brooks Wheelwright. This poem belongs to a sequence about friendship and familial piety, and about loyalty and faith. The poet's father is the departed friend to whom he now would turn for conversation and company.

An East Wind asperges Boston with Lynn's sulphurous brine.
Under the bridge of turrets my father built, – from turning sign
of CHEVROLET, out-topping our gilt State House dome
to burning sign of CARTER'S INK, – drip multitudes
of checker-board shadows. Inverted turreted reflections
sleeting over axle-grease billows, through all directions
cross-cut parliamentary gulls, who toss like gourds.

Speak. Speak to me again, as fresh saddle leather
(Speak; talk again) to a hunter smells of heather.
Come home. Wire a wire of warning without words.
Come home and talk to me again, my first friend. Father,
come home, dead man, who made your mind my home.

The poem is haunted by a duty to mourn, and an impulse to call his father back to life. At least, that is what I hear in the phrase "Wire a wire of warning": a ghostly Why oh why.

Regret and desolation are the tenor of the poem, but mingled with these is a sense of gratitude and something like hope. The poet's father has spoken to him, and will speak again. The city was his city. His spirit now inhabits the crowd of shadows beneath the billboard and neon signs. If this chaos has become the poet's home, his task is to make it more truly a home, through words. Accordingly, Father will be the word most rhymed with here, but only at the end, with its sudden vehemence of feeling: these are slant rhymes rather than true, "father," "leather," "heather" – as if to confess that he lent a borrowed potency to things and people that beside him now appear dim and approximate. The rhyme of dome with home, cunningly delayed, underscores the parallel between civic and domestic morale. But the poem has one economy hard to gauge: it lacks two lines, stopping at seven in the pseudo-octave and five in the sestet. Wheelwright, a modernist as instinctive as Joyce, explains the trick in a footnote that I cannot resist quoting: "The alexandrine meter makes up a total measure of seventy-two feet though this sonnet lacks two verses of the conventional quota. The second rhyme is far split to keep the ear expectant for the false rhyme on 3." Look into the numbers and you will see what he means. You get your money's worth of syllables. As for inward symmetry, we are led early to expect a proper match, a second couplet after the first, to underwrite the portrait of an unfallen city. We are given instead the vague and unsettling "multitudes," with the portrait dissolving in the lines that follow, until his father is called once more to redeem the city and restore the rhyme.

My next example comes from a recent and familiar poet, Elizabeth Bishop. This sonnet is a late poem, one of the last that Bishop completed, and it is called, simply, "Sonnet." Yet on the page, it does not look much like a sonnet; it seems a shape-poem, on the order of George Herbert's "Easter Wings." It looks like continuous motion within boundaries, as of liquid passing through a funnel, or jetting from a chasm or fountain.

Caught – the bubble
in the spirit-level,
a creature divided;
and the compass needle
wobbling and wavering,
undecided.
Freed – the broken
thermometer's mercury
running away;
and the rainbow-bird
from the narrow bevel
of the empty mirror,
flying wherever
it feels like, gay!

The poem is an allegory built from a few oppositions: confinement, freedom; division, unity; uncertainty, purpose; imitation, originality; life, immortality. A covenant has been made with the soul, and what it promised is performed in the startling release of the last lines. All the implications are joined in the elusive and philosophical word gay, to denote a happiness within, a joy at last unencumbered by fortune or circumstance.

In structure, Bishop's is a reverse sonnet, six lines in the first half, eight in the second, with three true rhymes: "divided" / "undecided" and "level" / "bevel" connect the halves of the poem from afar; "away" / "gay" links the ninth line and the fourteenth, and allows the ear to read the poem as an eight-six sonnet after all. The tightness seems an effect created by something more than Bishop's careful work with a few metaphors, though that is certainly all-important for the rhythm of containment and release: the spirit-level (a carpenter's tool, here with a metaphysical sense); the compass needle; and the thermometer mercury. They are three of a kind – but what to make of the "rainbow-bird" flying out of the empty mirror? A ghost is the only thing in the world that leaves no reflection in a mirror, and in the same family of words as "ghost" you will find aghast, the other side of gay, and Geist or spirit. Bishop is writing of the surprise to the soul imparted by the vision, or by the experience, of freedom. This sonnet is the record of a discovery of joy. It could not be even a syllable longer and be so purely what it is.

All the sonnets I have discussed so far have been observant and expressive in a high degree; but with the exception of Cummings's, their dominant mood is a kind of self-regard. The poet is thinking for himself or herself. Indeed, part of the value of the thought comes from our belief that this is so. Now there is a time-honored objection to modern poetry, going back to Keats's strictures on what he called "the egotistical sublime." Yes you are sublime, Keats said to Wordsworth (and to modern poets generally); but look at the cost to your powers of sympathy. A fair response might be to concede the point and turn the tables on the questioner. Are the rewards really so slender? But this may admit the truth of the charge too readily. There are modern poems by Hardy and Yeats and Frost, among others, that are not just exceptions to the rule but exceptions so vast that they seem to call for a different description. I close with another sonnet by Frost, which may make the work of description unnecessary.

"The Master Speed" is a poem about love that is strong without hyperbole. It has a second subject, friendship, considered not as the precursor but as the accompaniment of love. Yet these larger relations are tracked on the way to its being a poem in praise of marriage; or rather, an encouragement offered to a particular couple, Irma Frost and John Cone, on 15 October 1926. Frost liked the man his daughter was going to marry; we feel this without its having to be said. So it is very much an occasional poem, written to be spoken at the wedding, and, as with other such poems, we may wish to extend its hope to ourselves; but that feeling does not diminish our interest in the man and woman who inspired this public act of private speech.

No speed of wind or water rushing by
But you have speed far greater. You can climb
Back up a stream of radiance to the sky,
And back through history up the stream of time.
And you were given this swiftness, not for haste
Nor chiefly that you may go where you will,
But in the rush of everything to waste,
That you may have the power of standing still –
Off any still or moving thing you say.
Two such as you with such a master speed
Cannot be parted nor be swept away
From one another once you are agreed
That life is only life forevermore
Together wing to wing and oar to oar.

Frost's "you" seems to salute any of us. It is said in a broad yet also an intimate tone, a blend that few poets have controlled so capably. But the real you whom the poem means to address are the pair who together make this marriage.

One such as you would be prodigious, but to have found two! (That calls for a sonnet.) Marriage will change what each of them is, without making either less energetic or original: this is the poet's conceit and the consolation he offers. So his final lines at once cement and celebrate an agreement that runs parallel to the marriage vow, "That life is only life forevermore / Together wing to wing and oar to oar." Note that the wonderful closing lines are unpunctuated. They could not bear punctuation. Life is only life – it might stop there: a flat and honorable understatement, such as one hears from the characters in Frost's dramatic poems and dialogues. Life is only life forevermore passes on to a solemn and even a religious vow, touched, maybe, by a wish to add a clause to the contract while pretending not to exaggerate. Life is only life forevermore together: there you have the wish alongside the matter of fact. This man and wife will work in earnest at any task they resolve to work at. And to assure their progress, the poet equips them with instruments both natural and acquired, growing out of the body and improving on it. Wing to wing and oar to oar.

And yet there remains a doubt that cannot be appeased. This poem about friendship and marriage is haunted by an idea of destruction, "the rush of everything to waste." The desire to slow the rush is a possible and not a selfish motive for having children, and with this in mind, the poem sets beside destruction a curious opposite: the fascination of choosing. This may mean above all choosing to stand still; but "the power of standing still" is ambiguous: maintaining a former stance or standing motionless. Emerson included both kinds of standing in the opening paragraph of "Self-Reliance" when he declared that all original actions and works of art "teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side." Frost has remembered that advice. Still, it is one thing to say this to a reader, another to speak it as the relevant blessing to a man and woman starting their life together. How can a poet reckon the consequences for them?

Frost's sonnet brings out the meaning of their pact – it dramatizes their choice, deliberately and delicately – by organizing itself into a sonnet twice over. The formally apt break for the sestet occurs when the two of them stand away from the crowd, and a full dash marks the choice: " – / Off any still or moving thing you say." But then, as it were unofficially, the sestet begins its own resolution five lines from the end, with the phrase "Two such as you." These two, who know in themselves the power of standing still, have joined as one that cannot be parted. The ancestor of Frost's sonnet is Shakespeare's "Phoenix and Turtle," but that poem's idea of unity-in-division was Christian, whereas Frost, with a radicalism of conviction and craft, returns the paradox to its Platonic source. Man and woman were born one before they were made two. But their union takes on a greater dignity, when chosen, than it could inherit as a thing merely given.

Maverick experiment and enterprise, the frankness and the unconcern of Whitman's "barbaric yawp," these have been qualities fairly enough identified with American poetry. Their presence has never excluded the singular purpose and the compositional economy that belong properly to the sonnet; and I have tried to exhibit here the extraordinary variety of American objects that come under that description. Early in the last century, there was a crisis of belief in conventional forms, which made poets and critics think hard about why a tradition like the sonnet should persist. Responding to that situation in "Reflections on Vers Libre," T. S. Eliot observed that modern poets could renew old genres such as mock-epic even as they burned through more recently favored modes like the naturalist novel. The prognosis was uncertain. "We only need the coming of a satirist," Eliot guessed, "to prove that the heroic couplet has lost none of its edge since Dryden and Pope laid it down," but other forms were in direr straits: "As for the sonnet I am not so sure." Newness was not the determiner of value, for Eliot; of vers libre he remarked "it is the battle cry of freedom, and there is no freedom in art." Yet with all his skepticism, he had half persuaded himself that the sonnet was dead. The foregoing quotations show how much evidence already existed for a more appreciative judgment. Still one must sympathize with Eliot, as with all critics who, canvassing the history of an art, are drawn to speculate reasonably about its future. There was no good reason for the sonnet to be reborn in America, except that the thoughts and feelings of poets turned out to be renewable under this aspect, close as the form is to aria and aphorism, close to syllogism, closer to prayer.

The Yale Review
April 2005

Yale University

Editor: J. D. McClatchy
Associate Editor: Susan Bianconi


© 2005 by Yale University.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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