Scanty Plot of Ground: A Book of Sonnets

· Faber & Faber
Ebook
150
Pages
Eligible
This book will become available on September 9, 2025. You will not be charged until it is released.

About this ebook

In the introduction to his selection of some of the greatest sonnets ever written, Paul Muldoon reminds us that 'of the innumerable traditional verse forms, the sonnet is not only the most persistent but also the most pervasive.' He suggests that 'part of the reason for the durability of the sonnet is its very duration.' It's the perfect length for what Dante Gabriel Rossetti described as 'a moment's monument,' or Edna St. Vincent Millay as putting 'chaos into fourteen lines.' Among the diverting and diverse poets represented here are Elizabeth Bishop, Wanda Coleman, John Donne, Terrance Hayes, John Keats, Claude McKay, Christina Rossetti, William Shakespeare, Patricia Smith, William Wordsworth, and W.B. Yeats. There are also translations by Paul Muldoon of sonnets by Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke, Cesar Vallejo, as well as the doughty duo of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud.

About the author

Paul Muldoon has won many awards for his poetry including the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Griffin Prize, the Pulitzer Prize and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Born in County Armagh in 1951, he has lived since 1987 in the United States, where he is the Howard G. B. Clark Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University.

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