Wordsworth and the Sonnet by Lee M. Johnson, and: Sonnets of the English Renaissance ed. by J.W. Lever (review)

384 LETTERS IN CANADA 10 October (138) and since he had recently received a letter from Annabella (136) which he did not answer until 10 November (158), it seems more likely that the'A' in the letter of 13 October is not Augusta but Annabella. Finally, the first time Byron referred to 'your A' and 'my A' was occasioned surely not by the need to avoid ambiguity but by Lady Melbourne's attack on Augusta and by his own uncertainty as to what Annabella was up to (See letter of 30 April 1814 to Lady Melbourne, Lord Byron's Correspondence, John Murray, editor [London 1922] 11.254- 5). What she was up to and its effects are the subject of forthcoming volumes . Byron told Lady Melbourne in 1812 that he was 'as docile as a Dromedary' (n, 194), but docility could never be his modus vivendi for long. Mrs Parkyn's 'poney' that Aunt Charlotte is to send for because it is too small was bound to became a 'steed/ That knows his rider'; and the wandering steed it became after the scandal of the separation in 1816 was one that not even Aunt Melbourne, with all her knowledge of the horse-trade, could keep Byron from mounting. (PAUL FLECK) Lee M. Johnson, Wordsworth and the Sonnet, Anglistica, XIX. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger '973, Paper, Danish Kroner 72; Sonnets of the English Renaissance, selected and edited by J.W. Lever, Athlone Renaissance Library. London: Athlone Press of the University of London, cloth $1.2.00, paper, $4.50 'A poem of any length: wrote Coleridge, 'neither can be, nor ought to be, all poetry.' Wordsworth, undeterred by the brevity of the form, seems to have adapted his friend's maxim to the sonnet; despite the brilliance of his early single performances in this type of poem, his several lengthy sequences beginning with The River Duddan (1820) are not easy to read today. Wordsworth lived at a crucial period in the history of the sonnet. By the eighteenth century the Italian sonnet, with its energizing internal conflict between octave and sestet, had exhausted itseif. The English version of the form had a more discursive and logical structure, but nevertheless thrived on the thematic excitement generated by the characteristic topics of the Petrarchan sonnet. From the experimentation in the sonnet which marked the early part of the seventeenth century, only Milton was to emerge with a new mode; his eighteen sonnets in English Petrarchan in form but not in substance - have a gravity and strength which marks them as something quite new. Returning to the sonnet after a number of decades in which it had been little used, the poets of the late eighteenth century found in Milton's example a mirror of their own seriousness. Partly because of his influence, the Italian form was preferred as more authentic than the English by Wordsworth's generation. But lacking Milton's capacity to overcome its essentially binary structure and 'variously draw out the sense,' they were forced to find a new way of rendering the sonority they so admired. Though he tended to make guilty excuses about his preoccupation with sonnet writing, Wordsworth's attempt to solve this problem was one of the most serious projects of his career. In his new book Wordsworth and the Sonnet Lee Johnson observes that Wordsworth 'believed his ... poetical character had developed to accommodate and harmonize an extensive range of experience: in his terms, from the humblest to the most sublime activities - from the low to the high.' Wordsworth's sonnets were written throughout his life, but as Johnson notes there are two periods in which he concentrated intensely on them: I802- 7, when he strove to achieve his desired harmony as Milton had, in the individual sonnet, and I8I8-22, when he sought the same effect in the un-Miltonic genre of the sonnet sequence. Professor Johnson early admits that most of the sonnets in Wordsworth's sequences lack character, and his study aims to explain why he none the less finds the attempt to write sequences interesting. This discussion is pursued through an investigation of the public (Miltonic) and private (idyllic) centres of the early...