Sonnets of This Century

The sonnet demands everything of a poet and gives everything in return. This 1887 anthology gathers 270 poems by 126 different hands, from the luminous giants of the age (Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth) to voices nearly lost to time. Editor William Sharp intended the collection as both introduction and argument: that within these fourteen lines lives the fullest measure of poetic thought, where a single moment of intellectual or sensuous clarity achieves its most concentrated expression. Here you will find love rendered in perfect rhyming couplets, nature distilled to its essential grief or glory, mortality faced without flinching. The form itself becomes the subject: how much can one tight vessel hold? What emerges across these pages is not merely a survey of a literary form, but a portrait of an entire century wrestling with beauty, loss, and the terrible brevity of human feeling. For anyone who believes that constraint breeds depth, this anthology is an inexhaustible mine.