Unlocking the Heart

About the Book

Unlocking the Heart examines the sonnet in English from Sir Thomas Wyatt’s and Henry Howard’s imitations of Petrarch to the dark sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The form has provided some of the best-loved poems in the English language as well as insights into the sincerity of some of our greatest English poets. Often occasional, it has been equally able to express religious and worldly and private and public emotions as well as provide vehicles for social criticism and self-examination. Jerome Mazzaro investigates how some of these ends are accomplished. Henry Constable’s Diana and religious sonnets, William Shakespeares poems to the Young Man and Dark Lady, John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets,” John Milton’s “How Soon Hath Time” and “Methought I Saw,” William Wordsworth’s “London, 1802” and “Surprised by Joy,” John Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and “Bright Star,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee,” and Christina Rossetti’s “Monna Innominata” are among the poems examined. What emerges in the book’s carefully argued chapters is not so much a history but an affirmation of the range and richness and the adaptability of the sonnet as an expressive vehicle.

About the Author

Jerome Mazzaro is an accomplished poet and critic. He was born in Detroit, Michigan and received degrees from the State University of Iowa (M.A. in Creative Writing) and Wayne State University (A.B. and Ph.D.) He has taught at the University of Detroit, the State University of New York, Bennington College, and San Diego State College. In 1964, he was awarded a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and he has served as Editor and Contributing Editor for a number of journals. His books include a verse translation of Juvenal’s Satires, critical studies on Robert Lowell, the Renaissance English Lyric, William Carlos Williams, Luigi Pirandello, and Dante as well as four volumes of poetry. In 1996, he retired from the State University of New York at Buffalo and currently lives in Manhattan.