Shakespeare\u27s Pangrammatic Sonnet

Among Shakespeare\u27s 154 sonnets, is there one that contains every letter of the alphabet? The letter Z occurs in 14 sonnets, the letter Q in 44, the letter X in 43, the letter J in 50, and the letter K in 151. Assuming that the letters occur independently and at random - not unreasonable for rare letters - the probability that all five letters occur in a single sonnet is (.09)(.29)(.32)(.98) which equals 0.0023. The probability that all 154 sonnets fail to produce is equal to (1-.0023) raised to the 154th power, or 0.67, so the probability of at least one pangrammatic sonnet is 0.33

Sonnets

Poems include: The Runner by Nancy Hendricks and The Modern Atlas by Ina Marshall

Eros and Pilgrimage in Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s Poetry

The paper discusses erotic desire and the motif of going on pilgrimage in the opening of Geoffrey Chaucer’s General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales and in William Shakespeare’s sonnets. What connects most of the texts chosen for consideration in the paper is their diptych-like composition, corresponding to the dual theme of eros and pilgrimage. At the outset, I read the first eighteen lines of Chaucer’s Prologue and demonstrate how the passage attempts to balance and reconcile the eroticism underlying the description of nature at springtime with Christian devotion and the spirit of compunction. I support the view that the passage is the first wing of a diptych-like construction opening the General Prologue. The second part of the paper focuses on the motif of pilgrimage, particularly erotic pilgrimage, in Shakespeare’s sonnets. I observe that most of the sonnets that exploit the conceit of travel to the beloved form lyrical diptychs. Shakespeare reverses the medieval hierarchy of pilgrimage and desire espoused by Chaucer. Both poets explore and use to their own ends the tensions inherent in the juxtaposition of sacred and profane love. Their compositions encode deeper emotional patterns of desire: Chaucer’s narrator channels sexual drives into the route of communal national penance, whereas the Shakespearean persona employs religious sentiments in the service of private erotic infatuations

Combining quantitative narrative analysis and predictive modeling - an eye tracking study

As a part of a larger interdisciplinary project on Shakespeare sonnets’ reception (Jacobs et al., 2017; Xue et al., 2017), the present study analyzed the eye movement behavior of participants reading three of the 154 sonnets as a function of seven lexical features extracted via Quantitative Narrative Analysis (QNA). Using a machine learning- based predictive modeling approach five ‘surface’ features (word length, orthographic neighborhood density, word frequency, orthographic dissimilarity and sonority score) were detected as important predictors of total reading time and fixation probability in poetry reading. The fact that one phonological feature, i.e., sonority score, also played a role is in line with current theorizing on poetry reading. Our approach opens new ways for future eye movement research on reading poetic texts and other complex literary materials (cf. Jacobs, 2015c)

Lesbian Love Sonnets: Adrienne Rich and Carol Ann Duffy

Our conceptualization of sexuality is rooted in gender. Modern, western society defines sexuality as which genders one is and is not attracted to—often appearing as a binary between homosexuality and heterosexuality. Recently, however, queer theorists have begun to push against the idea of binary sexuality altogether. The interplay between gender and sexuality additionally manifests in the history of literature. Because the two are so intimately intertwined, writing about sexuality necessitates writing about gender. Twenty-One Love Poems by Adrienne Rich and Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy are two poetry collections where, as lesbian poets, gender and sexuality play an important role. Both Twenty-One Love Poems and Rapture draw on the tradition of sonnet sequences, a tradition defined by strict structure and gendered power dynamics. As lesbians with female speaker-poets writing about other women, Rich and Duffy both include and subvert themes and tropes, highlighted by their playing with the prescribed structure. Viewing the collections through the lens of sonnet sequences provides an intriguing perspective for examining the depiction of gender and, by extension, sexuality

‘Still finest wits are stilling Venus Rose’: Robert Southwell's ‘Optima Deo’, Venus and Adonis, and Tasso's canto della rosa

It has been argued, with reference to Venus and Adonis, that Shakespeare is the poet targeted specifically by Robert Southwell in his mournful stanza on love poetry in ‘The Author to the Reader’; this essay argues instead that Southwell's remark has a wider application to English poets of the early 1590s. The image of ‘Venus Rose’ draws attention to Tasso's celebrated canto della rosa (1581), which survives in a manuscript translation attributed to Southwell, although there is a significant shift, where Tasso's carpe diem conclusion is replaced with an invocation to turn to God. It has been suggested that the translation dates from Southwell's time in Rome in the 1580s; this essay favours a later date of composition, arguing that the poet was aware of both Spenser's adaptation of the song, and Daniel's rendering of it in Delia (1592), and that his translation should be read as further evidence of an engagement with contemporary poetry during the Jesuit mission in England. The essay also considers Shakespeare's treatment of the carpe florem motif in Venus and Adonis, arguing for the poet's direct awareness of Tasso's song and the Armida episode, and highlighting his bold reworking of it at the end of the poem

Symmetrical Womanhood: Poetry in the Woman\u27s Building Library

Late-nineteenth-century women poets shed midcentury sentimentality unevenly and at some cost, losing a sense of privacy, a (Christian) frame of reference, and an imagined community of women who shared their worldview. They also gained more public, secular, and professional sources of identity. The exact nature of this postsentimental self was unclear. Postsentimental poets often wrote in the genteel tradition, which trumpeted eternal truth and beauty while working from a position of subjective instability. Ultimately, their verses must be seen as powerfully fluid and transitional, registering (like the Woman\u27s Building Library) women\u27s struggle to inhabit more public forms of authority