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THE NINETEENTH CENTURY WITNESSED AN EXTRAORDINARY SONNET boom. The revival began in the mid-eighteenth century; among its most prominent exponents were Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, and William Lisle Bowles. Smith, influentially, sought a new English form for the sonnet, a form that would emphasize intensity of feeling rather than rhetorical stateliness. Reacting against the formal constraints of the Petrarchan sonnet, both Smith and Bowles developed a free approach to the Shakespearean model that tolerated a variety of irregular and hybrid constructions. As Paula Feldman and Daniel Robinson note, however, the popularity of these experiments "incurred the inevitable conservative backlash against innovation"1 and, by the early nineteenth century, when Wordsworth announced his "conversion"2 to the sonnet and arose as its modern patron, the self-styled inheritor of Milton's "trumpet, whence he blew / Soul-animating strains - alas too few!," the Petrarchan sonnet was once again the dominant model. The sonnet was a form framed for selfreflexive meditation on the constraints and pleasures of form itself; it was also a form framed for comparison. In an age when periodicals, annuals, and anthologies made short poems especially valuable, the sonnet - brief, precious, attemptable by all but perfected by few - was a highly marketable, collectable object, a gem consciously set off by its clarity and brilliance beside similar stones. To publish a sonnet was inevitably to enter into this market and a structure of comparative evaluation that reflected historical, national, literary, and political allegiances.
John Clare was a major sonneteer. His three published collections contain, respectively, twenty-one, sixty, and eighty-six sonnets. Among his unpublished works, particularly the material designed for a projected volume, The Midsummer Cushion (1832), there are over three hundred sonnets. As early as 1820, Clare announced to his publisher John Taylor, "I have been terribly plagued with the muses since I saw you I think I have wrote 50 Sonnets."3 They were important to him. In 1821, he instructs Taylor regarding his second book, The Village Minstrel, "have a good care over the Sonnets & I think you will find first & last a Selection far superiour to the first book"4 and again "be careful in perusing the Songs & Sonnet as they are my favourites."5 By 1824, he was planning an ambitious project...