The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets » (Reprint)

Helen Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.

Helen Vendler, widely regarded as our most accomplished interpreter of poetry, here serves as an incomparable guide to some of the best-loved poems in the English language.

In detailed commentaries on Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, Vendler reveals previously unperceived imaginative and stylistic features of the poems, pointing out not only new levels of import in particular lines, but also the ways in which the four parts of each sonnet work together to enact emotion and create dynamic effect. The commentaries—presented alongside the original and modernized texts—offer fresh perspectives on the individual poems, and, taken together, provide a full picture of Shakespeare's techniques as a working poet. With the help of Vendler's acute eye, we gain an appreciation of "Shakespeare's elated variety of invention, his ironic capacity, his astonishing refinement of technique, and, above all, the reach of his skeptical imaginative intent."

Vendler's understanding of the sonnets informs her readings on an accompanying compact disk, which is bound with the book. This recorded presentation of a selection of the poems, in giving aural form to Shakespeare's words, heightens our awareness of voice in lyric, and adds the dimension of sound to poems too often registered merely as written words.

Richard Howard - New York Times Book Review

Helen Vendler discloses, with great patience and ingenuity, how similarly adequate to the perceived splendor and urgency of the sonnets are their rhetorical conventions, devices that "work" as multifariously for lyric poetry as the stage contrivances of the Elizabethan (and Jacobean) theater did for the plays...Vendler is confident that "the sonnets will remain intelligible, moving and beautiful to contemporary and future readers." They will, if such readers also read Vendler's book. For hers is the most intricately inquiring and ingeniously responding study of these poems yet to be undertaken...Hers will prove to be the most valuable critical performance in recent American literature on classic texts...The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets is an authentic act of contemporary criticism as well as a reading of the most cherished lyric poetry in the English language. It constitutes a ground of poetic apprehension that cannot be gainsaid, and it offers the opportunity to enjoy the art of poetry where we all agree it must be found, as one enjoys most what one understands best.

Conventions of Reference

Introduction

THE SONNETS

Appendix 1: Key Words

Appendix 2: Defective Key Words

Words Consulted

Index of First Lines