How to Read a Poem: II. Sonnets

Henry Oliver is a literature blogger at The Common Reader. This salon will guide through some of the great English language poems and show you how to understand their nuances and niceties.

The second session is about sonnets, focusing on influence.

We will compare several sonnets to see how their structure and conventions allow writers from different centuries to interrogate timeless themes. We will do a close reading of ‘Those Winter Sundays‘ by Robert Hayden, and then compare an Elizabethan sonnet with a Romantic poem, to see how one writer borrows from and amends another.

1. Since There’s No Help by Michael Drayton
2. When We Two Parted by Lord Byron

We will also discuss:

1. The Mulberry Tree by John Heath Stubbs 

There are two other salons in this series:

1. One on sonnets
2. One on sympathy