The Sunday Telegraph

The force of poetry

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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

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