Product Description

This text aims to provide a 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 perspectives on the individual poems, and, taken together, provide a full picture of Shakespeare's techniques as a working poet. The reader can gain an appreciation of Shakespeare's elated variety of invention, his ironic capacity, his refinement of technique, and, above all, the reach of his skeptical imaginative intent.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #250414 in Books
• Published on: 1999-09-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 696 pages

Customer Reviews

what the books about and what is so good
The thing is about Helen Vendler's "Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets" is that it shows all 154 of shakepeare's sonnets and she not only writes the sonnets out she gives a full length review of the poem and helps you summarise it. I heard that to write this book she memorised the 154 sonnets that Shakespeare wrote so she could then understand how and WHY shakespeare uses these words in his sonnets.

A brilliant close reading
This commentary on the Sonnets ignores the biographical and sociological questions that many readers bring to these poems, in favour of a close reading of each sonnet taken in turn. The meaning is worked out not in terms of a 'message' that could be restated in prose, but through a demonstration of how a host of small details contribute to the meaningful harmony of the whole. Other commentaries explain, line by line, ambiguous syntax or archaic vocabulary. The great merit of this commentary is that each and every detail discussed is related to the meaning of the sonnet as a whole. This book (which is beautifully printed, by the way) is a model of how short poems should be analysed. That the sonnets reward reading of this kind provides the real proof of their greatness.