Poem of the Day: ‘On the Sonnet’

This spring, Great Britain’s University of Salford was widely reported to be removing sonnets from its writing curriculum, the better to distance students from the evils of “white Western culture.” Amid the mockery of the British press, the college has now apparently backtracked, insisting that, you know, it was never really a full-fledged plan. Sonnets, they suggest, might be acceptable (in a louche and down-market way) if they are, well, anti-Western enough, the way all poetry must be, to be poetry, which is really politics that rhymes, except that rhyme is probably a sign of the evil old days, so poetry is, by definition, politics, as we all knew before this unfortunate brouhaha made it into the British tabloids. Bah. The University of Salford is apparently where they say: Poetry is politics, politics poetry — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. And in the school’s honor The New York Sun presents a week of sonnets. Who better to begin with than John Keats (1795–1821)? And what better to begin with than “On the Sonnet,” a plaint (much repeated in the English sonnet tradition) that sonnets are a bound form — but in their constraints they find true poetry?