Abstract

This essay argues that the features of poetic style that have been criticized as abstract and repetitious in Mary Wroth’s sonnets should be considered in the context of a punk aesthetic: one that eschews a sense of formal mastery, includes syntactic breaks as distortion, includes the deliberately ugly, uses a pared-down and telegraphic vocabulary, and displays aggressive eroticism, albeit eroticism reliant on a set of idiosyncratic keywords.

pdf

Share