Orbicular Poetics

Chapter 3 recovers the formal lineage of Wordsworth’s ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’ by following it back through Milton’s political sonnets to the Tuscan poets of the cinquecento, pre-eminently Giovanni della Casa and Torquato Tasso. It suggests that Wordsworth’s conception of the Miltonic sonnet as a dewdrop exemplifies the relationship between gravity and gravità and asprezza, and proposes that the moral force of Wordsworth’s political achievement across the first decade of the nineteenth century was the result of his intricate negotiation with the actual weight and tendency to downward motion of the sonnet form. The chapter demonstrates the influence of the ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’ on Wordsworth’s political pamphlet the Convention of Cintra, and also discusses Samuel Daniel’s Defence of Rhyme and John Donne’s sonnets in this tradition.