'WAILFUL sonnets' was Shakespeare's phrase, no doubt with the generality
of Elizabethan love sonnets in mind. True it is, that their mellifluously monotonous hyperboles make up one of the less intriguing corners of English literature. Mr. Lever's book tries to remove this tedium by stressing how these poets were not effusing their souls, but mastering tech- nical problems, and developing or recombin- ing literary conventions in a sonnet tradition from Petrarch onwards. This leads to some useful discussions: those, for example, about Wyatt's pioneering attempts to create sonnet rhythms in 'English, and about Shakespeare's ingenious yet poignant stits on the woeful mistress'-eyebrow tradition. The defects of this book are that there is too much summary and paraphrase, and that the emphasis on conven- tion obscures the distinctively personal achievement—Sidney's lively variety, Shake- speare's unrivalled immediacy and individu- ality—which is what makes some sonnets worth reading while others are not. Finally, when a tissue of literary mechanisms—con- ventions, ideas of mutability, cosmos-meta- phors and the rest—suddenly issues in things like 'The English imagination operates through Shakespeare's great compound metaphors . . . the English spirit is triumphantly ascendant in the figure of the Friend,' one can only invert the hackneyed tag, and say: 'The mice are in
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