Open Poetry sonnet competition


Poets Who Have Written Sonnets
The lists below are not exhaustive and comprise only sonneteers writing in English (so no Petrarch, Michaelangelo etc) . They have been culled from The Oxford Book of Sonnets, The Penguin Book of Sonnets and two books of poetry from the First and Second World Wars (Up the Line to Death and The Terrible Rain). The poets' names from these anthologies have been divided into two lists: those born before 1900 and those born after. This clearly demonstrates that the sonnet is far from being a dead art form!

We cannot hope to have gathered every name of a published poet who has written sonnets. You are therefore invited to contribute names yourself in two categories:
1. Published poets (and here we really mean published in sole author book form or major anthology). Some well established poets may already be listed here, simply because they are not in the anthologies above - sometimes just because they have made their mark after publication of the anthologies. You can include here a link to any website that the poet uses to make his or her poetry available (one link only). If your own name is already listed here and you want a link to your website, please email details to info@openpoetry.org.uk and we will create the link for you.
2. Unpublished poets - and this can include yourself, if you write sonnets. You can include here a link to any website you use to make your poetry available (one link only).

Misuse
The web being what it is, we recognise that there are ways in which the automatic posting of links can be abused. We will run periodic checks on links, but users of this site are strongly encouraged to use the contact menu on the left to advise us of any links they follow that do not lead to sonnets/genuine poetry or lead to material that is in any other way not appropriate. We will delete names and links that contravene what we hope is a common sense of propriety and, should any consistent problem of abuse arise, we will remove the automatic link coding from this page. Let's trust that a few don't spoil it for the many.
There are also good lists of sonneteers at Sonnet Central.
Born before 1900Born before 1900
William Alabaster
William Allingham
Matthew Arnold
Philip Ayres
William Edmonstone Aytoun
John Bampfylde
Maurice Baring
Barnaby Barnes
William Barnes
Richard Barnfield
Thomas Lovell Beddoes
Aphra Behn
Charles Best
Louisa Sarah Bevington
William Blake
Edmund Blunden
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
Louise Bogan
William Lisle Bowles
Mark Alexander Boyd
Katherine Bradley (aka Michael Field)
Robert Bridges
Rupert Brooke
William Browne
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Robert Browning
Robert Buchanan
Robert Burns
Samuel Butler
Ada Cambridge
Thomas Campion
Thomas Carew
George Chapman
John Clare
Arthur Hugh Clough
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Hartley Coleridge
Henry Constable
Edith Cooper (aka Michael Field)
William Cory
Charles Cotton
William Cowper
Hart Crane
e.e. cummings
Samuel Daniel
George Darley
Elizabeth Daryrush
Sir John Davies
John Davies of Hereford
Sidney Dobell
Digby Mackworth Dolben
John Donne
Edward Dowden
Ernest Dowson
Michael Drayton
William Drummond
Alice Dunbar-Nelson
Lord Dunsany
Thomas Edwards
George Eliot
Ebenezer Elliott
Giles Fletcher
Robert Frost
George Gascoigne
Wilfrid Gibson
Sir Arthur Gorges
Robert Graves
Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke
Thomas Grey
William Habington
Thomas Hardy
William Ernest Henley
George Herbert
Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury
Robert Herrick
Thomas Hood
Laurence Hope (aka Adela Nicolson)
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
James Leigh Hunt
Aldous Huxley
Robinson Jeffers
Mary F. Johnson
Ben Jonson
John Keats
John Keble
Rudyard Kipling
Walter Savage Landor
Emma Lazarus
Kenneth Leslie
Anne Locke
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
George Gordon, Lord Byron
Archibald Macleish
Philip Bourke Marston
John Masefield
Claude McKay
George Meredith
Alice Meynell
Edna St Vincent Millay
John Milton
Marianne Moore
Edwin Muir
Wilfrid Owen
Robert Palmer
Dorothy Parker
Edgar Allan Poe
Ezra Pound
Sir Walter Ralegh
John Crowe Ransom
Edgell Rickword
Mary Robinson
Agnes Mary Frances Robinson
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Christina Rossetti
Thomas Russell
Siegfried Sassoon
William Bell Scott
Anna Seward
William Shakespeare
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Sir Philip Sidney
Charlotte Smith
Charles Hamilton Sorley
E.H. Sorley
Robert Southey
Edmund Spenser
James Kenneth Stephen
Robert Louis Stevenson
Trumbull Stickney
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Joshua Sylvester
Arthur Symons
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Edward Thomas
Francis Thompson
Mary Tighe
Jean Toomer
Frederick Goddard Tuckerman
Charles Tennyson Turner
Aubrey Thomas de Vere
Edmund Waller
Sylvia Townsend Warner
John Leicester Warren, Baron de Tabley
Thomas Warton
Augusta Webster
John Greenleaf Whittier
Oscar Wilde
Helen Williams
William Wordsworth
Lady Mary Wroth
Sir Thomas Wyatt
Elinor Wylie
William Butler Yeats
Frances Brett Young
Born after 1900Born after 1900
Fleur Adcock
Julia Alvarez
Simon Armitage
John Ashbery
Wynstan Hugh Auden
David Baker
George Barker
James K. Baxter
John Bayliss
John Berryman
Frank Bidart
Elizabeth Bishop
Star Black
Eavan Boland
Joe Bolton
Gwendolyn Brooks
Alan Brownjohn
John Burnside
Norman Cameron
Roy Campbell
Rafael Campo
Hayden Carruth
Ciaran Carson
Charles Causley
Amy Clampitt
Billy Collins
Jane Cooper
Herbert Corby
Countee Cullen
R.N. Currey
Donald Davie
Rita Dove
Jane Draycott
Carol Ann Duffy
Douglas Dunn
Thomas Stearns Eliot
Alistair Elliott
William Empson
Paul Engle
Gavin Ewart
Paul Farley
Beth Ann Fennelly
Roy Fuller
John Fuller
Dana Gioia
Louise Gluck
Thom Gunn
Daniel Gutstein
Marilyn Hacker
Rachel Hadas
Donald Hall
Tony Harrison
Christopher Hassall
Robert Hayden
Seamus Heaney
John Heath-Stubbs
Anthony Hecht
Geoffrey Hill
John Hollander
Alec Derwent Hope
David Huddle
Mark Jarman
Alan Jenkins
Denis Johnson
June Jordan
Donald Justice
Patrick Kavanagh
Weldon Kees
Karl Kirchwey
Stephen Knight
Philip Larkin
James Lasdun
Deborah Laser
Phillis Levin
Kate Light
Michael Longley
Robert Lowell
Malcolm Lowry
George Macbeth
Elizabeth Macklin
Derek Mahon
Charles Martin
William Matthews
J.D. McClatchy
Medbh McGuckian
Jamie McKendrick
William Meredith
James Merrill
W.S. Merwin
Robert Mezey
Merrill Moore
Edwin Morgan
Andrew Motion
Paul Muldoon
Richard Murphy
Les Murray
Marilyn Nelson
Mike Nelson
Howard Nemerov
Jacqueline Osherow
Alice Oswald
Molly Peacock
Sylvia Plath
Stanley Plumly
Marie Ponsot
Peter Porter
Christopher Reid
Adrienne Rich
Robin Robertson
Judith Rodriguez
Sherod Santos
Jason Schneiderman
Grace Schulman
Frederick Goddard Seidel
Hugh Seidman
Vikram Seth
Charles Simic
Louis Simpson
Tom Sleigh
Kenneth Slessor
Bruce Smith
Stephen Spender
Leon Stokesbury
Dylan Thomas
Anthony Thwaite
John Updike
Jean Valentine
Ellen Bryant Voigt
Derek Walcott
Margaret Walker
Rosanna Warren
Susan Wicks
Richard Wilbur
James Wright
Charles Wright
More published poetsMore Published Poets
Austin Alexis
C. B. Anderson
Sharon Ashton
Yakov Azriel
Willis Barnstone
Tony Barnstone
Simon Barraclough
Bruce Bennett
Ted Berrigan
Paul Bussan
Mark Callanan
Gerry Cambridge
Enriqueta Carrington
Jared Carter
Wanda Coleman
Jean De Sponde
Michael Farrand
Kenneth Fields
Robert Garioch
Robert Bates Graber
Paul Groves
Oz Hardwick
Dolores Hayden
John Haynes
Bernard Holibar
Juleigh Howard Hobson
John Irvine
Mike Jenkins
Julie Kane
Stuart Kermack
Gill Learner
Paul Lee
Sylvia Lees
Grevel Lindop
Duncan Gillies MacLaurin
Charlotte Mandel
Sue Millard
Nina Mindova
Edwin Morgan
Don Paterson
Anjali Paul
Jennifer Perrine
Naan Pocen
Patricia Pogson
Lesley Quayle
Jose Rizal Reyes
Rainer Maria Rilke
James Robertson
Jacqui Rowe
Michael Shepherd
Copland Smith
Gerald Stern
Mike Stocks
Marilyn Taylor
Carrieann Thunell
Angela Topping
Hayley Trasler
Kathrine Varnes
Karen Volkman
Wendy Webb
Zachariah Wells
Christopher Whitby
Gail White
Jeffrey Cyphers Wright
Ian Yearsley
Unpublished sonneteersUnpublished Poets
Polly Atkin
Gill Baconnier
Richard Britton
Lynne Bryan
Spike Lord Burbadge
Antoine Cassar
Elisabeth Constantine
Dusty Dusty Wentz
Angeline Farrow
Rachel Fox
Maureen Gallagher
Jane Grainger
Carolyn Rose Ham
Robin Helweg-Larsen
Nicola Holt
Sue Kindon
Lucy Lepchani
Pat Little
Carolyn Long
Owen Lowery
Alison Mace
Melanie Mason
Ronnie Miller
Helen Moore
Carolyn Parsons
Nicky Phillips
Stella Pye
Chiara Realini
Heron Reign
Jose Rizal Reyes
Lyndsey Shir-McDermott-Pour
Annabelle Tipper
Jonathan Weiss
Jonathan Weiss
Roddy Williams
Liza Mcalister Williams

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