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

Related episodes

• Shakespeare’s Sonnets
  
  24 Jun, 2021 820 English and Old English literatures
• Sir Thomas Wyatt
  
  9 May, 2024 820 English and Old English literatures
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  
  18 Apr, 2019 820 English and Old English literatures
• The Metaphysical Poets
  
  3 Jul, 2008 820 English and Old English literatures
• The Later Romantics
  
  15 Apr, 2004 820 English and Old English literatures
• The Romantics
  
  12 Oct, 2000 820 English and Old English literatures
• Romeo and Juliet
  
  17 Feb, 2022 820 English and Old English literatures
• John Donne
  
  12 Jan, 2023 820 English and Old English literatures
• Shakespeare’s Work
  
  11 May, 2000 820 English and Old English literatures
• Shakespeare and Literary Criticism
  
  4 Mar, 1999 820 English and Old English literatures

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

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.