Modern Love and the Sonetto Caudato: Comedic Intervention Through the Satiric Sonnet Form (Critical Essay‪)‬

In 1885, when asked by William Sharp about the form of the sonnets of Modern Love, one of which he wished to include in his forthcoming anthology, Sonnets of this Century, George Meredith responded: "The Italians allow of 16 lines, under the title of 'Sonnets with a tail.' But the lines of 'Modern Love' were not designed for that form.'' (3) And that was that. From that time and into the present, critical conversation has not been overly concerned with the formal considerations of Meredith's poetry, but rather, has seemed content to weigh by varying measures his talent as a novelist. (4) More recent criticism of the Meredith corpus that does take account of the poetry seems to limit itself to three overlapping projects: establishing Meredith's relative modernity; passing judgment--both positive and negative--on a poetics often characterized as prosaic; and weighing in on what loan Williams summarizes as Meredith's liability to be saddled by critics with the stigma of obscurity and affectation. (5) What has emerged from such a critical frame is a picture of an anachronistic artist: awkward, yet ahead of his time. Indeed, Meredith's Modern Love does employ a willfully prosaic, difficult style in what many critics read as a thematic and aesthetic anticipation of Modernist fiction. However, such tacit agreement in line of inquiry, extending from publication of the poem to our present moment, has done more to shroud Meredithian poetics in obscurity than the famously obscure poetics of Meredith ever could have done on their own. In their continued assessments of Meredith as a proto-modernist, critics often fail to note that Modern Love looks just as decisively backward. Modern Love is not simply an anticipation of the Modernist novel. I suggest that to reassess the significance of Meredith's most famous poetic work, we should revisit Meredith's only mention of the form of Modern Love, and ask if perhaps the pointed denial of an Italian precursor by a poet always fond of riddles and enigmas might amount to a deliberate confession, or invocation of the "tailed" sonnet. I argue that critics (perhaps even partly because of Meredith's coyly pregnant denial) heretofore have missed the decidedly mannered and often archaic Modern Love's formal heritage and allegiance, misunderstanding that this fifty-sonnet series serves as a Victorian exploration of the satirical and comedic possibilities of what to this day remains primarily a poetic oddity of the Renaissance: the sonetto caudato. (6)