Book Report: Great Sonnets edited by Paul Negri (1994)

This is a Dover thrift edition that collects a pile of sonnets that had fallen into the public domain. It collects them from a large number of authors, chiefly British and American, and includes a lot of favorites from Shakespeare, Millay, Whittier, Tennyson, Poe, Swinburne, and so on. It’s like a good sampler album of music. You find some you know and like, you find some you don’t think much of, but you also find a couple you like a whole lot and plan to look up more from the author.

This is the latest in the volumes of poetry that I’ve read aloud to my children as they’ve played so they can hear some cool words, and the older boy at four is starting to understand some of the narratives. This means it’s back to Ogden Nash since sonnets sometimes tend toward the That’s what Mommies and Daddies do.

At any rate, a good book. Worth the couple pennies it would cost you.

Books mentioned in this review:

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