This spring, Great Britain’s University of Salford was widely reported to be removing sonnets from its writing curriculum, the better to distance students from the evils of “white Western culture.” Amid the mockery of the British press, the college has now apparently backtracked, insisting that, you know, it was never really a full-fledged plan. Sonnets, they suggest, might be acceptable (in a louche and down-market way) if they are, well, anti-Western enough, the way all poetry must be, to be poetry, which is really politics that rhymes, except that rhyme is probably a sign of the evil old days, so poetry is, by definition, politics, as we all knew before this unfortunate brouhaha made it into the British tabloids. Bah. The University of Salford is apparently where they say: Poetry is politics, politics poetry — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. And in the school’s honor The New York Sun presents a week of sonnets. Who better to begin with than John Keats (1795–1821)? And what better to begin with than “On the Sonnet,” a plaint (much repeated in the English sonnet tradition) that sonnets are a bound form — but in their constraints they find true poetry?

On the Sonnet
by John Keats

If by dull rhymes our English must be chain’d,
And, like Andromeda, the Sonnet sweet
Fetter’d, in spite of pained loveliness;
Let us find out, if we must be constrain’d,
Sandals more interwoven and complete
To fit the naked foot of poesy;
Let us inspect the lyre, and weigh the stress
Of every chord, and see what may be gain’d
By ear industrious, and attention meet:
Misers of sound and syllable, no less
Than Midas of his coinage, let us be
Jealous of dead leaves in the bay wreath crown;
So, if we may not let the Muse be free,
She will be bound with garlands of her own.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.