If, it being World Poetry Day, you’re prompted to have a bash at poetry yourself, there’s a lot to be said for starting by contemplating Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130. Sitting down once again to address that oldest of poetic subjects – love – Shakespeare manages to “make it new” by confronting the clichés head on and wittily subverting them, before delivering a killer closing couplet which warmly celebrates love as it is experienced, without artifice and exaggeration.  

Shakespeare is, of course, the ultimate English poetry icon, with a quick online search bringing up adverts for socks, bobbleheads, bath ducks, biscuits, and just about any product you’d care to name, all glowing with marketable merrie Englishness. All of which makes it easy to forget that Shakespeare was himself very much a “world poetry” figure, constantly in dialogue with international events and literary currents.  

In specifically poetic terms, it’s worth remembering that his celebrated iambic line is a deft refinement of a form that Chaucer had adopted from Italy in the fourteenth century. Indeed, as we peruse the celebrated sonnets – a form which itself has withstood the shifts of fashion to thrive in 21st-century English poetry – we see Shakespeare appropriating and adapting a form which had only been introduced into the country earlier in his own century, and in Sonnet 130 he is taking an eloquent pop at its imported thematic and stylistic commonplace. 

Current world events have returned me to American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, the 2018 collection by African American poet Terrance Hayes, written in response to Donald Trump’s first term as president. Hayes’ poems crackle with the energy of internal debate which has always been part of the form’s appeal, and are alive with a fusion of anger, hope, despair, and many aspects of that staple: love.  

It was justly acclaimed on publication, yet an inevitable, single one-star Amazon review moans that “calling something a 'sonnet' just because it has 14 lines is a perversion of the English language”, oblivious to the irony of such cavilling addressing a form of which even the name is Italian (sonetto = little song). Significantly, it also misses the point of how poetry evolves: we absorb, we react, and we transform.  

On the Reading as a Writer module on the MA Creative Writing course, we focus on the sonnet, not just to think about form and structure (in narrative fiction as much as poetry), but also to explore boundaries and expectations. We explore when to respect them, when to cross them or break them down, when to shift them when no one’s looking, and how to whistle and appear innocent when they look back. For, in looking at a selection of sonnets from the sixteenth century to the present, we can see how it’s possible to take something so familiar that it’s become a cliché and twist it round so that it stops the reader short.  

“I’m interested in Shakespeare,” said Hayes in a 2018 interview, “but especially how Shakespeare is in conversation with Scooby-Doo or The Walking Dead”. So, if you do decide to sharpen your quill this World Poetry Day, why not try a sonnet, and fill it with the past, the present, and the unexpected? 

If there be nothing new, but that which is 

Hath been before … 

So begins Shakespeare’s Sonnet 59, before riffing on the commonplace that nothing is new under the sun and, in doing so, making it new once again. It’s what makes Shakespeare so enduring, and it’s what has shaped the sonnet’s admirable tradition of upsetting traditionalists, the world over. 

Oz Hardwick is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University.