The Sonnets of Thomas Pringle: Migration and Poetic Form

When the Scottish poet Thomas Pringle emigrated to the Cape Colony in 1820 he voyaged also into a new creative life and an art responsive to his colonial home, “sterner verse” for “darker scenes”. Accompanying him to the Cape, the sonnet became his most consistent choice for capturing his experiences and convictions, his personal crises and the greater trauma of colonial appropriation and racial oppression. In this study his unique contribution to the Romantic-era sonnet is for the first ti...