GoldsmithвЂ™s joke was not a put-down I got the impression that deadpan irony simply underlies his poetic philosophy. Many poets poke fun at the technical strictures of the form, which John Keats went so far as to call вЂњchains,вЂќ yet they were chains that he, along with William Wordsworth, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Edna Saint Vincent Millay, found paradoxically freeing. His вЂњjokeвЂќ is based on the mathematical conventions of the sonnet, a poem which frequently contains eight lines that build in a certain direction (the octave) followed by six lines that resolve or release that theme (the sestet). вЂњThatвЂ™s my sonnet,вЂќ he said (or something like that). When he learned that I was interested in sonnets, he took out a piece of paper and with deadpan irony wrote out the following: About ten years ago, I had a short conversation at a poetry performance with the conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith. The sonnet parody is very simple: it makes fun of the sonnetвЂ™s rules and themes. But in reviewing a handful of these mocking sonnets, I wonder if they reveal opportunities for humor in the sonnet form itself and, if we go back to the original poems they mock, perhaps subtler instances of humor in those ostensibly вЂњseriousвЂќ sonnets. Yet so many poets have had a good time making fun of these very tropes, creating their own sonnet parody genre in the process.

Popular views of the sonnet are that this fourteen-line poem deals with unrequited love, lovesickness, heartbreak, relationship problems, or themes of political love-none of which seem like particularly funny topics on the surface. A friend and I have been puzzling about whether sonnets are, by nature of their form and conventions, essentially funny poems.

Sonnet examples by students about love