The Modern Sonnet: W.H. Auden, Philip Larkin, and Elizabeth Jennings

Abstract

The study of the sonnet is, in the end, a study of poetry at its most intense. Sonnets, perhaps more than other forms of poetry, reflect on their own making and their own being. The writing of sonnets engenders new and different forms. Auden’s sonnets written in China are an integral part of an experimental travelogue co-authored with Christopher Isherwood. The prolific sonnets written by Philip Larkin and Elizabeth Jennings as youthful aspiring poets can be seen to underpin the virtuosic handling of line and metre and rhythm in their later work. As we have seen, the sonnet is an intensely self-questioning artefact, continually alert to its own formal constraints and transgressions. If it declares its place in a long-evolving history of poetic form and takes its authority and sustenance from that, it also repeatedly demonstrates its own restless and inexhaustible inventiveness.