George Starbuck's "Sonnet with a Different Letter at the End of Every Line"

Nov 5, 2025

Explore the playful genius of George Starbuck as the podcast delves into his inventive sonnet, structured with a letter twist at every line's end. Discover how Starbuck's background and notable influences shaped his witty, protest-laden poetry. The discussion reveals language's dynamic nature, likening it to the thrill of testing a fast car. The host reads the sonnet aloud, inviting listeners into the rhythm and charm of Starbuck's work, which masterfully blends humor with deeper reflections on society and personal themes.

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INSIGHT

Language As Playful Laboratory

Poetry can be used to test the limits of language while honoring its order and structure.
Sean Johnson likens pushing language in poetry to safely opening a fast car on an empty road.

ANECDOTE

Mustang Metaphor For Risk

Sean Johnson recounts racing a Mustang GT on empty farm roads as a youthful folly to illustrate risk-taking with craft.
He uses that memory to argue it's safer to 'open it up' with English in a poem than with a fast car.

INSIGHT

Constraint Drives Invention

George Starbuck's sonnet deliberately constraints rhyme by ending each line with a different letter.
The poem layers that constraint with other verbal tricks, producing surprising shapes in reading and sound.

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Today’s poem is a “row of perfect rhymes” and an absolute delight. Happy reading.

You can find the text of the poem here.

George Starbuck was born in Columbus, Ohio on June 15, 1931. He grew up in Illinois and California. He attended the University of California at Berkeley for two years, and the University of Chicago for three. He then studied with Archibald MacLeish and Robert Lowell, alongside peers Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, at Harvard University. Starbuck won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for his collection Bone Thoughts (1960). He is the author of several other books, including The Argot Merchant Disaster: New and Selected Poems (1982), Elegy in a Country Church Yard (1974), and White Paper (1966). He taught at the State University College at Buffalo, the University of Iowa, and Boston University.

Starbuck’s witty songs of protest are usually concerned with love, war, and the spiritual temper of the times. John Holmes believed that “there hasn’t been as much word excitement ... for years,” as one finds in Bone Thoughts. Harvey Shapiro pointed out that Starbuck’s work is attractive because of its “witty, improvisational surface, slangy and familiar address, brilliant aural quality” and added that Starbuck may become a “spokesman for the bright, unhappy young men.” Louise Bogan asserted that his daring satire “sets him off from the poets of generalized rebellion.”

After reading Bone Thoughts, Holmes hoped for other books in the same vein; R.F. Clayton found that, in White Paper(1966), the verse again stings with parody. Although Robert D. Spector wasn’t sure of Starbuck’s sincerity in Bone Thoughts, he rated the poems in White Paper, which range “from parody to elegy to sonnets, and even acrostic exercises,” as “generally superior examples of their kind.” In particular, Spector wrote, when Starbuck juxtaposes McNamara’s political language and a Quaker’s self-immolation by burning, or wryly offers an academician’s praise for this nation’s demonstration of humanity by halting its bombing for “five whole days,” we sense this poet’s genuine commitment.

Starbuck died in Tuscaloosa, Alabama on August 1, 1996.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

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