Linda Marsh Boeken

This broad selection of sonnets from the fourteenth century to the twentieth century is arranged thematically, and ranges from the love sonnets of the early masters through despair, faith, the spirit of place, death and other themes. As well as the great sonnets of Petrarch and Shakespeare, Donne and Milton, it includes deeply moving examples of the sonnets of poets as diverse as Wordsworth Keats, Hopkins, Meredith, Brooke and Yeats.Although the sonnet - the 'little song' - is an exacting verse form, its astonishing range of expression has ensured its popularity with poet and reader alike. The fourteen lines are long enough for a theme to be developed, and short enough to test the poet's gift for reconciling the conventions of the form with the variety and richness of language.

While no collection of limericks can claim to be 'complete', The Wordsworth Book of Limericks contains an astonishing collection of over 1,800 verses - all of them comical, and a great number so far from cleanliness as to verge on the obscene.