Part of
Directions in Empirical Literary Studies: In honor of Willie van PeerEdited by Sonia Zyngier, Marisa Bortolussi, Anna Chesnokova and Jan Auracher
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature 5] 2008
► pp. 329–342
“Tradition” is represented by “formalist” (“metrist”) verse; “Innovation” by “aformalist” (“free”) composition. This birthday tribute to Professor van Peer takes the formalist side, and discusses innovation and its possibilities in the context of the sonnet form. The form and its traditional variants are discussed, then ten original sonnets are presented in first draft, the opening section of a proposed sequence called Sonnets from the Wilderness. A commentary on the text, its intentions, innovations, and compositional problems, then follows.