I'm curious that you're looking for everything "except" the modern period. Louise Bogan's sonnets are pivotal to my thinking about the form -- for their awareness of the sonnet's historical content and style and her reactions within it/against it. I sure wouldn't call her a modernist, but she wrote before the death of Merrill and after the death of Swinburne. -Tom T.

Of course, there's a sonnet or two by Bill Knott that demand attention,
"The Sculpture" for one, but there is also this poem I remember hearing
in Russia of all places. "Performance Art" I think it's called.

Phillis Levin's book of Sonnets feature some real good ones.
Dan Gutstein's has one there that I enjoy.

Also, Hirsh and Boland are doing one with Norton.

Check too poems by Erin Belieu and Greg Williamson.

I don't know if these poets would interest you,
but there you have it.

JH

ps. thanks for blogging. I enjoy your posts.

This doesn't fit your preferred dates of composition, but it is my favorite sonnet in the world. And part of it's because of the last line--that "think"-- she doesn't say "I wouldn't." But "I do not *think* I would." I love the (both poignant and harsh) honesty of that word in that moment--it feels very human.

LOVE IS NOT ALL

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay

He's hardly under-read (except maybe in the US), and I'm sure you're already on the case, but I'd put in a big vote for Don Paterson, his own sonnets and his exciting new adaptations of Rilke.

I haven't read much Don Paterson, but the sonnet of his I found on Poets.org, "The Thread", seems pretty hokey. I'm not an anti-sonnet person, but I think that's an example of the bad kind.

The good kind would be more like those written by Frank O'Hara, who isn't really known for his sonnets, but they're pretty good. "Sonnet for Jane Freilicher" is probably one of those O'Hara poems people think is too trivial or something, but whatever, it's fun to read.

Ah, Don Paterson! As has been mentioned in a few places elsewhere on Harriet, he's done quite an interesting version of Rilke's "Sonnets to Orpheus," published in book form as Orpheus.

Here's one of eight that originally appeared in the June 2004 issue of Poetry:

The Dead
by Don Paterson

Our business is with fruit and leaf and bloom.
Though they speak with more than just the season's tongue—
the colours that they blaze from the dark loam
all have something of the jealous tang

of the dead about them. What do we know of their part
in this, those secret brothers of the harrow,
invigorators of the soil—oiling the dirt
so liberally with their essence, their black marrow?

But here's the question. Are the flower and fruit
held out to us in love, or merely thrust
up at us, their masters, like a fist?

Or are they the lords, asleep amongst the roots,
granting to us in their great largesse
this hybrid thing—part brute force, part mute kiss?

Steve:

Here's a tidbit for your editing project, from Sidney Lanier's The Science of English Verse (1880):

"It is in fact a disgrace to our tongue that we have no collection of the English sonnets which is even tolerable, although the sonnet is really the primordial form of modern English lyric poetry; and it is a result of this circumstance that the prodigious wealth of our language in beautiful works of this genre is almost unknown except to the professional worker among books."