ABSTRACT
The biographical element in Elizabethan sequences may be seen as the distracting gossip that it essentially is, and the Victorian’s concern to establish, the identity of Mr W. H. as an overplayed side-issue. Similar numerological analyses have been made of the sequences of Daniel. The development of the narrative sequence is of some interest, for it is a development which seems to have come to fruition in the nineteenth century, when the sonnet sequence again attained some popularity. Meredith’s sequence, though in sixteen-line poems, is a triumph of psychological realism. In the modern period the sonnet sequence has been found suitable for more meditative or speculative treatment of public themes. In company with an ingenious use of personae, such a device becomes pointed and meaningful, and is a reminder of the wealth of structural possibilities inherent in the very notion of the sonnet sequence, and largely unexplored.
