Despair over sonnets ban

UNIVERSITY chiefs have sidelined sonnets from a creative writing course over concerns they are ‘products of white Western culture’.

The poetic form, notably used by Shakespeare, has fallen foul of efforts to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ at the University of Salford.

Following a drive to make the course more diverse, secondyear students will no longer be required to write sonnets for their assessment.

But historian Dr Zareer Masani called the change ‘patronising’ and ‘outrageous’, telling The Sunday Telegraph: ‘It is content, not form, that counts.’

Examples include Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias, which includes the line: ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’