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: #237366 in Books
• Published on: 1999-09-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 696 pages

Review
From time to time, a work of criticism appears that promises to inaugurate a new phase of the art...Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, Stephen Greenblatt: each heralded, in different ways, a paradigm shift in critical practice. And now Helen Vendler...makes a bold attempt to change criticism again. Her ambitious "chef d'oeuvre", the fruit of decades of memorizing and meditating on Shakespeare's "Sonnets", significantly takes the form of a critical commentary...She has chosen her topic strategically. The "Sonnets" is the supreme lyric masterpiece in English, yet, although often edited, it has been neglected critically, as if too challenging and demanding, too dangerous for direct response. Yet Vendler's originality goes further. For she has decided to return criticism to the study of art; to the sort of response that leads to appreciative evaluation rather than manipulation...The rapid adumbration of Shakespeare's variety is as brilliant as anything Vendler has written. But in commenting on each individual sonnet in turn, she surpasses herself, again and again making fresh observations on poems we thought familiar. In almost any other critic this would be a "tour de force". But in her it is simply honest empiricism, free from any agenda but that of being receptive. -- Alastair Fowler "Times Literary Supplement"

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.