Nineteenth-century poets found in the fourteen lines of the sonnet a versatile and endlessly fascinating poetic resource. For Wordsworth it was a uniquely intimate and confessional medium, the 'key' with which Shakespeare unlocked his heart; for Dante Gabriel Rossetti it was a 'monument' on which the most important moments of existence could be inscribed. This study traces the history of the form through the work of a range of nineteenth-century writers, from established figures like Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins to less well-known poets like Felicia Hemans, Theodore Watts-Dunton and Augusta Webster, and attempts to suggest some of the reasons for its enduring appeal.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2006
'In Phelan's very capable hands, this short and seemingly specialized study proves to be absorbing, far ranging, and rich in implication.' - Choice (Journal of the American Library Association)

Introduction
The Wordsworthian Sonnet Revival: Poems in Two Volumes (1807)
'Transcripts of the Private Heart': The Sonnet and Autobiography
The Political Sonnet
The Devotional Sonnet
'Illegal Attachments': The Amatory Sonnet Sequence
'Thought's Pure Diamond': The Sonnet at the End of the Century
Notes
Bibliography
Index

JOSEPH PHELAN is Senior Lecturer in English at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. He is the editor of Clough: Selected Poems (1995) and the author of a number of articles on nineteenth-century literature and culture.