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“Phillis Levin collects classic and subversive versions of this most traditional form. [Levin’s] Introduction alone is really an intellectual history of the West by way of the sonnet. This is one of my desert-island books.”
- Kimiko Hahn

“Thanks to Penguin Books for offering their readers half a millennium of the sonnet in English—edited and introduced with wisdom and generosity—a treasure-trove of the first order.”
- Robert Fagles

“As Phillis Levin so rightly puts it, the sonnet is about process, being a movement that leads from image to insight, from inquiry to understanding. She has undertaken this autobiography of a literary form with sustained knowledge from early to now, intimate comprehension, remarkable clarity and elegance of style, leading all of us enthusiasts of poetry to a new understanding. It is a kind of twenty-first-century miracle, and we are all more than grateful.”
- Mary Ann Caws, Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature, The Graduate Center, CUNY

“No recent publication on sonnets has included such a broad spectrum of sonnet writers or attempted to present so complete a history of the sonnet.”
- Library Journal

“Edited by the superb poet Phillis Levin, this collection and its exemplary introduction bring the sonnet vibrantly into the twenty-first century. Levin’s prose and her taste seem themselves nourished by the elegant excessiveness the sonnet transforms into strange and moving precision.”
- Charles Altieri, Professor of English and Director, Consortium for the Arts,
University of California, Berkeley

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