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Heather H.
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The Sonnet in British North American Printed Matter before 1800
Through the catalogues of book collections and libraries in early British North America we can intuit a widespread familiarity with the various powers of the sonnet. John Milton’s sonnet-innovations and Alexander Pope’s anti-sonnet raillery mark the sonnet in the work of two writers whose presence in these collections is ubiquitous. And yet the ‘first’ American sonnets are considered more often than not to have appeared only around the turn of the nineteenth century and to have been highly derivative formally and thematically from English and British-Petrarchan models until Emerson, Whitman, and Poe appeared a couple of generations later. In the 1930s, H. Carter Davidson and then Milton Ellis established the fact that, although the sonnet had a healthy presence in the early American magazine and print culture (comprising original sonnets, transatlantic reproductions, and ‘sonnets’ which were not sonnets at all), the non-middlebrow original or innovative ‘American’ sonnet, a late starter, began with Emerson.
Yet the sonnet form must have inflected an earlier period in British North American literary culture and production.* To rely on Davidson and Ellis in order to chart a print history for the sonnet misses that both of their studies of printed matter take the 1780s as a starting point (during which time there was certainly a sonnet boom in printed matter). But what of the years before? This paper demonstrates how we may extend back our ideas of the ‘American Sonnet’ for at least a century before the Transcendental sonnet, through the reading of both printed and circulated matter before 1800. The sonnet from the American, I argue, was by then well-travelled and more varied as a complex form, marking the possible beginnings for a different generic history in American letters to those of the British.
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*taking early ‘America’ in a pan-Continental sense the history is vast and vastly different, and spans different centuries, as even only the work of Sor Juana attests, or many of the poems in Roger LeMoine’s L’amérique et les poètes français de la Renaissance. But that would be a different paper.
Yet the sonnet form must have inflected an earlier period in British North American literary culture and production.* To rely on Davidson and Ellis in order to chart a print history for the sonnet misses that both of their studies of printed matter take the 1780s as a starting point (during which time there was certainly a sonnet boom in printed matter). But what of the years before? This paper demonstrates how we may extend back our ideas of the ‘American Sonnet’ for at least a century before the Transcendental sonnet, through the reading of both printed and circulated matter before 1800. The sonnet from the American, I argue, was by then well-travelled and more varied as a complex form, marking the possible beginnings for a different generic history in American letters to those of the British.
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*taking early ‘America’ in a pan-Continental sense the history is vast and vastly different, and spans different centuries, as even only the work of Sor Juana attests, or many of the poems in Roger LeMoine’s L’amérique et les poètes français de la Renaissance. But that would be a different paper.
Heather H. Yeung 楊希蒂 teaches in poetry and poetics at the University of Dundee, Scotland. The archive of her poetic work is held in the Scottish Poetry Library. Her academic publications include the monographs Spatial Engagement with Poetry (2015) and On Literary Plasticity (2020).