Super size me: Experiments with the shape and size of contemporary sonnets in English
Abstract
The paper discusses theoretical issues of the development of contemporary sonnets in English with special attention devoted to the size and shape of the poems. The sonnet’s verbal space of fourteen decasyllabic lines arranged in quatrains and tercets undergoes a drastic re-arrangement in the texts of modern sonneteers. The most characteristic experiments with the form of the sonnet concern, among other things, expanding its structure by means of doubling the poem’s length, redefining the concept of the line of verse and substituting a decasyllabic iambic pentameter line with a block of lines stripped off any metrical beat and often prosaic in rhythm or immuring the sonnet within other texts and thus multiplying its meanings. The other tendency operating in contemporary sonnets is hybridization of the form by means of amalgamating the verbal with the visual, a process which expands the sonnet generically and makes of it an inter-art form.
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