The force of poetry
SIR – As someone who believes that literary texts always have cultural and historical contexts, I find it difficult to quarrel with the idea that sonnets are “products of white Western culture” (report, May 15). And literature courses do need revision from time to time.
Nevertheless, it is worth remembering that, in spite of Audre Lorde’s claim that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”, there have been many writers who have used “pre-established literary forms which tend to be the products of white Western culture” to challenge that culture.
The Jamaican Francis Williams (1690-1762) used Latin elegiac couplets to offer a spirited defence of his right to be a black poet, while the Barbadian Hilton Vaughan (1901-1985) used English verse in traditional forms, including sonnets, to show the beauty and dignity which could be found in black working-class life, and to criticise the political orthodoxies of the colonial society of the 1930s and 1940s.
More recently, in her collection, The Kids (2021), Hannah Lowe has reimagined the sonnet to offer vivid portraits of multicultural Britain.
Dr John T Gilmore
University of Warwick