Poetry - critics

Thomas Ledger - Sonnet 116

‘confronts all vicissitudes that have afflicted the course of love described in these sonnets and declares that they are of no account’

Boyd - The Flea

‘Donne’s poetry does not demean women but appreciates and acknowledges all of their capabilities’

‘Though there is only one speaker, her silent voice booms’

Mabry - The Garden of Love

‘Skill of the author to take us with him and experience his emotions’

‘Have it happen to us’

‘His horror becomes our horror, we are repulsed with him and despair with him’

Remember

‘The form of a Petrachan sonnet…. shows how the reader sacrifices her personal desires in an expression of true love.’

The Ruined Maid

‘Both women in the poem are ruined’

‘Wome were ruined by social codes of their era and the limited options available to them’

La Belle Dame sans Merci

‘The knights solitude is the image framing the poem’

‘Keats does not identify his questioner, or the knight, or the lady’

Non sum qualis

Symons - ‘To have made and to have killed a poet’

Wilde - ‘Poor wounded, wonderful fellow’ ‘he knew what love was’

Whoso list to hount - Sanders

‘It is almost impossible that they did not mean the poem to be read as an expression of their own thoughts and feelings’