Word: sonnet
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...world is too much with us," wrote William Wordsworth in a famous sonnet, and Russell Baker echoes the poet three times a week in the New York Times. A funny place to do it, in a paper full of world news. But to Humorist Baker, 42, even a fraction of all the news that's fit to print is far too much. "The law of life," he writes, "is that there is almost always less happening than meets...
Thonet (pronounced like sonnet) was a German industrial designer of the nineteenth century whose chairs revolutionized the idea of form in furnishings. Thonet was also concerned with processes of manufacture, so his well-designed furniture was made available to all for the first time at low prices. In this marriage of functionalism and craftsmanship, Thonet anticipated the 20th century precepts of the Bauhaus...
Another modern poet might have preferred a single long poem to examine and express his emotional contradictions (Roethke's The Lost Son), or perhaps a series of poems less restrictive in form than the sonnet (Snod-grass Heart's Needle). But Berryman chose a sequence of sonnets, a selection which is initially mysterious: a sonnetter inherits elaborate conventions of expression so often used as to seem, almost invariably, stale and uncommunicative to a modern audience. Berryman enthusiastically accepts these restrictions and puts them to work for himself. A single sonnet is particularly suited to the elaborate presentation of one feeling...
...with Berryman's sonnets. Recognizing that a sonnet sequence was just what he wanted to write, he animated the conventions, utilized the restrictions, and made himself a sonneteer...
...Scorn not the sonnet," wrote William Wordsworth, who had composed hundreds of those 14-line verses, some memorable, but most of them, notably his 47 sonnets on the ecclesiastical history of England, long forgotten...