Sonnets of Various Sizes

In a letter, Hopkins wrote that the English sonnet is too short, because Italian vowels are longer than English vowels, and the Italian is the original and perfect sonnet. So in this collection you will find one extended sonnet – Les Murray wrote that an example of ‘sprawl’ (which is something he approves of) is a sonnet in its twenty-first line. You will also find some sonnets from the Italian of Dante, crammed into tight English vowels. Some sonnets that don’t rhyme. Some in the rhyming-couplet form of John Clare. And some poems of fourteen lines which are probably not sonnets at all.