Sprachkunst Jahrgang XL/2009/2. Halbband, pp. 279-300, 2011/05/17
Beiträge zur Literaturwissenschaft
This essay proposes an answer to the question why Romantic poets in England as elsewhere cultivated the sonnet so insistently although the self-enclosed and demonstratively artificial form of this genre runs counter to a Romantic aesthetics of openness to the infinite and of organic form. Close readings of three canonical sonnets by Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley seek to demonstrate how Romantic poets have succeeded in disrupting the formal constraints and opening up the sonnet to momentary visions of the infinite.
