SOURCE: “Dialogue of Poets and Poetry: Intertextual Patterns in the Sonnets of Jorge Guillén,” in Anales de la Literatura Espanola Contemporanea, Vol. 16, No. 1-2, 1991, pp. 73-89.

In the following essay, Mandlove discusses the use of the sonnet form in the poetry of Guillén.

The persistence of the sonnet as a vital poetic form from the Renaissance into the twentieth century—a century characterized by free verse and experimentation—attests to the fascination that the form holds for poets and readers alike. Nearly every major Western poet has cultivated the sonnet and no other form has inspired as many poems dedicated to itself as has the sonnet. Lope de Vega, Borges, Jiménez, Wordsworth, Poe, Keats, Gabriel Rossetti and Guillén are among those who have written sonnets on the sonnet. There are sonnets in praise of the sonnet, satirical sonnets on the sonnet, sonnet parodies and...