The Penguin Book of the Sonnet 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English edited by Phillis Levin Penguin, 526 pp., $18 PERHAPS IT'S NO SURPRISE that an anthology that sets out to "defy or redefine the sonnet tradition" isn't the place to go for a handy collection of the best sonnets written in English in the last five hundred years. But "The Penguin Book of the Sonnet" believes that we can see the sonnet best in the work of such poets as John Ashbery, Billy Collins, and Adrienne Rich--not one of whose selections in this anthology shows much clear idea of what a sonnet is. "The Penguin Book of the Sonnet" offers twelve-line sonnets, thirteen-line sonnets, fifteen-line sonnets, twenty-eight-line sonnets, curtal sonnets, and caudated sonnets. It's enough to make any respectable rondel, rondine, or rondeau slink off in despair. To read the volume's introduction is to realize that the editor, Phillis Levin, knew what she was doing--which, when one thinks about it, makes things worse: "The Penguin Book of the Sonnet" was compiled in cold blood. Some 670 poems fill its pages, but even the most charitable judgment couldn't claim that 30 percent of the would-be sonnets meet the bare requirements of the form. There's a decent smattering of Shakespeare and some good work from Edna St. Vincent Millay and Robert Frost, but they are not sufficient to define the collection. English poets have tried from time to time to vary the sonnet in meter, rhyme, and even number of lines. But who can read Robert Lowell's "History" or John Hollander's "Powers of Thirteen" and come away with the same feeling that the sonnets of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Keats provide? A poem caudated to a fare-thee-well, unrhymed, mixed in its line lengths, and culminating in nothing agreeable to our sense of closure--a poem like many of the selections in "The Penguin Book of the Sonnet," in other words--just isn't what we call a sonnet. Too much in Levin's thirty-eight-page introduction is given over to the dispiriting bromides of postmodern discourse. Sonnets, we learn, cross the "boundaries of time, style, religion, race, nationality, and ethnic identity"--because "political and structural pressures engender innovation, subversion, and renewal." After "privileging" Meredith's "Modern Love" (a collection of sixteen-liners that, admittedly, Meredith himself called sonnets), the volume concludes with a poem by Levin's research assistant, Jason Schneiderman. At least Levin's own offering is fourteen lines long, although it is in no discernible meter. Meanwhile, a perfectly good poem such as Robert Hayden's (non-sonnet) "Those Winter Sundays" is distorted by being shoe-horned into a sonnet collection. To see what went wrong with "The Penguin Book of the Sonnet," take a look at the selection from Eavan Boland, wildly praised by Levin in the introduction. The poem begins as an adequate sonnet--fourteen lines, with an actual rhyme scheme--but Boland ends with this couplet: "You are its sum, struggling to survive-- / A fantasy of honey your reprieve." Why would any self-respecting poet go so far out of her way to annoy readers by slant-rhyming the two most important lines in the poem, and in nineteen syllables, at that? What's the point, except to transgress? And if the poem exists primarily to violate the sonnet form, then what's it doing in a sonnet collection? I wish there were some good that could be said of "The Penguin Book of the Sonnet," but the amateurish biographical notes don't make it easy. The classic howler "Edward Arlington Robinson" puts in an appearance, and for the average reader, the early selections (from Wyatt through the mid-seventeenth century) offer no glosses on unusual or archaic words. Levin cites no sources for her copy-texts, so anyone not intimately familiar with the hundreds of textual decisions incumbent on the editor of, say, Shakespeare's sonnets, will be at a considerable loss. Penguin's patrons deserve better than "The Penguin Book of the Sonnet." Len Krisak is the author of the poetry collections "Midland" and "Even as We Speak." His translation of Ovid's "Art of Love" will be published next year.