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Eleanor BoudreauPh.D. Candidate, Instructor,
and Kingsbury Graduate Fellow, Florida State University |
‘Silence Is One Part of Speech’:
Apocalypse in the American Sonnet from Poe to Dungy
Apocalypse in the American Sonnet from Poe to Dungy
The lie we like to tell about poetic form is that its repetitions are inherently pleasing and comforting, because (or so the lie goes) these repetitions mimic the continuity of the world. There are two rather obvious problems with this argument. First, the world is, in fact, not continuous. As any reader must acknowledge, someday everyone she knows will be dead, and someday after that, the sun will burn out and everyone on earth will die. And second, poetic form is not continuous either. Because form is not simply repetition, it is repetition with an implied or prescribed end. Form is, therefore, a reminder of death and the end of the world. And there is nowhere that the apocalyptic nature of form is more present than in the sonnet, the shortest of the English-language fixed forms. This paper examines how American poets have used the doom within the sonnet to embody the precarity and resultant drive to survive at the heart of the American experience and poetic tradition.
As well as probe early American sonnets by Edgar Allan Poe, I examine the proliferation of sonnet sequences in American writing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Specifically, I focus on Camille T. Dungy’s book of sonnets What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison and Terrance Hayes’ Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. I demonstrate that, contradictorily, the apocalyptic nature of the sonnet form leads to its proliferation in American poetry.
As well as probe early American sonnets by Edgar Allan Poe, I examine the proliferation of sonnet sequences in American writing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Specifically, I focus on Camille T. Dungy’s book of sonnets What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison and Terrance Hayes’ Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. I demonstrate that, contradictorily, the apocalyptic nature of the sonnet form leads to its proliferation in American poetry.
Eleanor Boudreau is a poet who has worked as a dry-cleaner and as a radio reporter. Her first book, Earnest, Earnest? (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. Currently, she is a Kingsbury Graduate Fellow at Florida State University where she is finishing her Ph.D.