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Affecting authenticity: Sonnets from the Portuguese and Modern Love
Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 2002 by Houston, Natalie M
As Richard Altick suggests, "the steady drift of nineteenth-century critical attention was away from the work and toward the writer" (96). But that tendency was especially strong within the field of sonnet criticism:
after all that can be said about forms and manners, it is the thought which constitutes the right sonnet ... if it be the sincere, unaffected exposition of a just sentiment, rather blossoming out of life spontaneously than sought for its own sake intrinsically, it can never be utterly valueless or absolutely thrown away And here may be fitly enforced to the poet the necessity of choosing the noblest fruits of his life for poetic expression: living all he writes, and counting life of infinitely more importance than any reproduction of it in art can be. (Davies 192)
Almost paradoxically, the rule-bound sonnet form was seen as enabling sincerity and spontaneity. Of course, for some critics, the authenticity of the sonnet as an expression of the poet's life and feelings was tempered by the rigidity of the form. Arthur Hugh Clough suggested that
the Sonnet is not a likely or usual medium for the expression of very strong present feeling, and this simply because it is the most artificial and elaborate of all stanzas or systems of verse. It is, indeed, very possible that habitual use may render even its most difficult and most perfect form tolerably familiar; but passion would assuredly not naturally and at once frame-and still more assuredly would not pause to frame-the artful harmonies of the Sonnet. it is surely rather fitted to be the after-record of impressions for reflective and for meditative poetry. (49)
Because the sonnet's formal structure was so well defined, its popularity as a form risked obscuring the boundary between true art and simple workmanship:
Its extreme artificiality is at once a test and a temptation,-a test, since it is only a true poet who can make artificiality serve the purposes of art; and a temptation, since the artificial construction-the mere form-can be easily built up and filled out with Words by the simplest handicraftsman in verse. (Norton 628)
Alternately hailed as the epitome of poetic craft or as the expression of an individual's life, the sonnet's condensed form and its many different interpretations throughout the period make evident the tension between Victorian critical notions of poetic workmanship and authentic feeling.
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