The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets

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.

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, aims to heighten the reader's awareness of voice in lyric, and adds the dimension of sound to poems too often registered merely as written words.