Scanty Plot of Ground

An essential anthology of beloved classics, hidden treasures and standout contemporary examples of this ever-vital and enthralling verse form.

In the introduction to his selection of some of the greatest sonnets ever written, Paul Muldoon reminds us that part of the reason for the ‘durability’ of the sonnet is its ‘very specific duration’. It is the perfect length for what Dante Gabriel Rossetti described as ‘a moment’s monument’ or William Wordsworth as a ‘scanty plot of ground’ offering ‘brief solace’ for those who ‘have felt the weight of too much liberty’. Among the poets included in this centuries-spanning edition are Elizabeth Bishop, Wanda Coleman, John Donne, Terrance Hayes, John Keats, Claude McKay, Edna St Vincent Millay, Christina Rossetti, William Shakespeare, Patricia Smith and W. B. Yeats. There are Paul Muldoon’s own translations of sonnets by Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke, César Vallejo, and a scurrilous collaboration by Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud.