The Sonnet

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Sonnet, the most enduring form in the poet’s armoury. For over five hundred years its fourteen lines have exercised poetic minds from Petrarch and Shakespeare, to Milton, Wordsworth and Heaney. It has inspired the duelling verse of ‘sonneteering’, encapsulated the political perspectives of Cromwell and Kennedy and most of all it has provided a way to meditate upon love.Dante Gabriel Rossetti called it “the moment’s monument”. What is it about the Sonnet that has inspired poets to bind themselves by its strictures again and again? With Sir Frank Kermode, author of many books including Shakespeare’s Language; Phillis Levin, Poet in Residence and Professor of English at Hofstra University; Jonathan Bate, King Alfred Professor of English at the University of Liverpool.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Sir Frank Kermode 2 episodes
  
• Phillis Levin No other episodes
  Poet in Residence and Professor of English at Hofstra University
• Jonathan Bate 16 episodes
  King Alfred Professor of English at the University of Liverpool

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Programme ID: p00547gy

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00547gy

Auto-category: 821.1 (English poetry)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. The sonnet's the most enduring form in the poet's armoury.