Almost half the poems in the last two decades of Borges's life were sonnets, in part because once blindness took over, he could compose and keep them in his head until he found a scribe to dictate them to. Returning now from the
poets to their work, I wish to say a few words more on the sonnet form.
Not only people, events, and the reading and study of Spanish poetry have been the preparation for this book, but the sonnet itself has been preparing its own way. It keeps waking up in the work of Borges and Dylan Thomas, in Lorca
and Richard Wilbur, in Neruda and David Wojahn, when many might have thought that Baudelaire and Wordsworth, or possibly Yeats, had written the last ones we would read as vibrant, original poetry.
The older sonnets, lost or neglected, also have a waylike dead writersof resurfacing. So we have John Donne's seventeenth-century "Holy Sonnets" coming up to help form what Sonia Raiziss has called "the metaphysical passion" in contemporary American poetry; there are Gerard Manley Hopkins's unpublished nineteenth-century "Terrible Sonnets," which (like Melville's forgotten Billy Budd manuscript) entered the canon in our time.
