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Stephen ReganProfessor of English,
Durham University, UK |
Broken Homes and Broken Hearts:
The Desolation of the American Sonnet
The Desolation of the American Sonnet
The sonnet has frequently been imagined as a work of domestic architecture, a small but perfectly designed room which serves as a space for reflection, as well as a place where love might find security and lasting happiness. Such a room might also be a fitting memorial or monument to love. This way of thinking about the sonnet extends all the way from John Donne (‘We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms’) to Dante Gabriel Rossetti (in the sonnet sequence titled The House of Life) and beyond. One of the striking distinguishing features of the American sonnet is its radical destabilization of this familiar structural equation between the sonnet form and the house / the home / the room. The sonnets of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman are notable for their desolate domestic settings, alluding mysteriously to terror and anguish in ‘An upper chamber in a darkened house’ and mourning the loss of the occupants in a ‘red house’ poignantly remembered as ‘Absent of beauty as a broken heart’. The compactness of the sonnet form is used to great effect in Tuckerman’s creation of melancholic vignettes, but the sonnet form itself alters in response to the painful perception of brokenness. Sonnets of domestic desolation abound in twentieth-century American poetry, from Edwin Arlington Robinson’s ‘Haunted House’ and Robert Lowell’s ‘To Speak of Woe That is in Marriage’ to Sylvia Plath’s ‘Aftermath’ and Shane McCrae’s poems of broken marriage in Mule. This presentation will look briefly at the intense relationship between the sonnet space and desolate domestic settings, especially in James Merrill’s short sonnet sequence, ‘The Broken Home’ (1966). It will claim that, despite the long-established association of the sonnet with structural and emotional ideals of unity, harmony and resolution, American poets have often employed the form, with powerful effect, in a desolate exploration of broken homes and broken hearts.
Stephen Regan is a professor in the Department of English Studies and Director of The Centre for Poetry and Poetics at Durham University. His most recent book is The Sonnet, the first comprehensive study of the sonnet form in English poetry (Oxford UP 2019).