THE SONNET

Associate Professor Peter Anderson, English Literary Studies, University of Cape Town

Monday 27–Friday 31 January 5.00 pm COURSE FEES R550; Staff and students R275  

This course will explore the most famous of poetic forms, the sonnet, from its earliest days to the present, with a close critical reading of selected sonnets. The course will discuss the form and development of the sonnet and its strange capacity for resolving itself and life’s questions, the mystery of fourteen lines, the power of metre and rhyme and the famous ‘volta’.

Texts will be provided in class.

Lecture titles

  1. Thomas Wyatt: ‘Whoso list to hunt’; Sir Philip Sidney: ‘With how sad steps’
  2. Shakespeare: ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’; George Herbert: ‘Prayer’
  3. Wordsworth: ‘Sonnet composed upon Westminster Bridge’; Keats: ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Homer’
  4. W.H. Auden: ‘At the far end of the enormous room’, ‘A shilling life’
  5. Carol Anne Duffy: ‘Prayer’; Don Paterson: ‘The flowers ‘

Recommended reading

www.poetryfoundation.com

TO BOOK: https://www.webtickets.co.za/v2/performance.aspx?itemid=1554723015