What I Read in May 2026 – “These stories appeal to my sense of humor as well as my taste for formal constraints.”

NOT SHAKESPEARE Poems and a Defence of Ryme (1592-1605), Samuel Daniel – Author of the “Delia” sequence of fifty sonnets, a genuine sequence, with for example lines ending one poem and beginning the next. For some reason Thomas Campion, a writer of the most beautiful songs, wrote an essay arguing that English poetry should exclude rhyme, inspiring Daniel’s great defense of rhyme. Rhetorically…