An Explanation of the Sonnet On the Sonnet by John Keats

Writing to his brother, George Keats, in a journal letter dated April, l819, John Keats stated that he had been experimenting with the sonnet form in an attempt to improve it. I have been endeavoring to discover a better sonnet stanza, he writes. The legitimate does not suit the language over-well from the pouncing rhymes—the other appears too elegiac—and the couplet at the end seldom has a pleasing effect—I do not pretend to have succeeded—it will explain itself. In these sentences with which he introduces the experimental sonnet On The Sonnet Keats indicates its theme. The poem, enclosed with the letter and appearing as it does in illustration of his brief critique, indicates that Keats had given more than passing attention to his dissatisfaction with the legitimate and the other sonnet forms. It indicates that he had been struggling for some time to find a more satisfactory sonnet form. A careful analysis of the sonnets written prior to this time shows this to be true, and reveals certain characteristics which lead one to the conclusion that Keats had been experimenting with the sonnet form for at least three years. Regularly and consistently he struggles to achieve a closer affinity between sound and sense; he attempts to overreach the sharp definitive lines of the Petrarchan octave and sestet; he moves away from the traditional Shakespearean couplet; and finally, in On The Sonnet he expresses him­self in a sonnet of a single stanza. I propose, in this study, to present an explication of On The Sonnet, and, as the basis of this explication, to trace the development of the struggle of which reference has just been made. As Keats\u27s letter and sonnet complement each other, the former throwing light on what otherwise might be obscure elements in the latter, I shall examine each with reference to the other. The text which I will follow is Clarence Dewitt Thorpe’s John Keats, Complete Poems and Selected Letters. References to the sonnet On The Sonnet as well as quotations, in whole or in part, from other sonnets of the poet will be from this text. Any exceptions to this procedure will be noted in footnotes. Certain words which Keats used in his poems have undergone slight modifications in meaning with the passage oi time; therefore, I have followed the Oxford English Dictionary, (ed. 1933) whenever I had any doubt as to the standard meaning of a word in the period in which Keats wrote