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.

Vendler's careful and sympathetic examination of the poems' organizing principles (such as the 'strategies of unfolding' that Shakespeare uses to shift a sonnet's emotional terrain, sometimes repeatedly, as the poem proceeds) yields surprising insights...Vendler proposes that her book serve as a supplement to annotated texts such as the Penguin and the Yale editions, but she is probably selling herself short. Her volume is fuller than the Penguin, and more inviting than Stephen Booth's impressive but rather forbidding Yale edition. A reader who has never tried the sonnets in their entirety, or at least looked at them in college, would have no trouble with this engaging and enlightening edition.

Helen Vendler's long study of the art of Shakespeare's Sonnetsis that purely aesthetic study of poetic language in action...Reading it is like being offered a huge plate of oysters, or doing a Spot-the-Ball competition, or playing obsessively with a Rubik's Cube that always comes out right after the effort of following a tight technical argument...It is Vendler's supreme critical virtue that she can write from inside a poem, as if she is in the workshop witnessing its making...Again and again, I want to haul out examples of this supreme critical imagination at work, but it should be apparent that criticism of the Sonnets, and by extension, critical accounts of poetry, will never be the same again. This is an epic, innovatory study which ought to mark a new beginning for criticism.

With admirable self-reliance and hardly a glance at the main stream of historical and gender-studies criticism, the famed Harvard professor reads the poems pragmatically, as 'verbal contraptions,' explaining how and why they work the way they do. The result is not just a few brilliant perceptions about, say, Shakespeare's use of clichés or chiasmus (although those are here), but the best teachers' edition on the market. Vendler's preface, and the essays that accompany each sonnet...will make a nearly perfect introduction for college students--or for anyone else who wants to learn how to read the poems for their skill and originality.

[A] magisterial work...[and] an invaluable contribution to the serious study of Shakespeare's sonnets by a preeminent critic of lyric poetry, widely viewed as the best close reader of poetry writing today.

Close readings that train a brilliant spotlight on Shakespeare's poetic performance...A celebrated and prolific critic, reviewer, and lecturer on poetry, Vendler offers an illuminating companion for Bardolators of all levels and stripes...Vendler analyzes each sonnet in turn (they appear in both original and modernized formats), explicating in an accessible manner the structures that organize them...An immensely enriching account of Shakespeare's complex verse: readings whose perspicuity and accuracy will form a solid basis for many more.

Vendler has created an exhaustive and wonderful work on Shakespeare's sonnets...This study will become a standard work and is essential for all academic libraries.

Vendler has lived with these works all her life, and spent much of the past nine years working on this hefty book. The result is more than a reliable guide, it is a portable critical encyclopedia...In short, this is just the book for anybody wishing to spend a little quality time with our greatest poet.

Close readings that train a brilliant spotlight on Shakespeare's poetic performance...A celebrated and prolific critic, reviewer, and lecturer on poetry, Vendler offers an illuminating companion for Bardolators ofall levels and stripes...Vendler analyzes each sonnet in turn (they appear in both original and modernized formats), explicating in an accessible manner the structures that organize them...An immensely enriching account of Shakespeare'scomplex verse: readings whose perspicuity and accuracy will form a solid basis for many more.

There is so much more to these sonnets than meets the eye, Vendler's insights into their poetics are more than useful: they are indispensable.

This book is a great achievement, the work of an author with an almost devout passion for good poems, a passion that the academy has not succeeded in killing.

A few pages of this marvelous study convince us that "no poet ever found more linguistic forms to replicate human responses than Shakespeare in the Sonnets."

This eagerly awaited work has been nine years coming, an understandable period considering the magnitude of Helen Vendler's project...In her valuable introduction, Vendler declares that the sonnets represent "the largest tract of unexamined Shakespearean lines left open to scrutiny." Readers like me, who thought they were relatively familiar with these poems, will discover just how unfamiliar their various sequences turn out to be…It is consistent with Vendler's total immersion in the sonnets that she has learned them all by heart, as an enabling means of support for the 'evidential' criticism--in which "instant and sufficient linguistic evidence" is produced to back up every critical remark--she so unfailingly and brilliantly practices.

Helen Vendler...has produced here what is probably the least irrelevant and most critically illuminating of all extended commentaries on the Sonnets.

Though intricate and technical, Vendler's analysis of the sonnets is never boring...Her meticulous structures of analysis are a gift: They quietly allow one's own interpretive faculty to rise. By clearing up all the mechanical obstacles to understanding, your own apprehension of the poem emerges whole, and you've only to recognize it...Vendler's myriad attentions to the minute patterning of words and sounds yield...mysterious glories. She diligently, even stringently, employs her technical surveys, and what emerges from beneath their grid is surprising, substantial, evanescent.

In detailed commentaries on Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, Vendler reveals previously unperceived imaginative and stylistic features of the poems. 154 facsimiles. 35 illustrations.

often registered merely as written words.

Conventions of Reference

Introduction

THE SONNETS

Appendix 1: Key Words

Appendix 2: Defective Key Words

Words Consulted

Index of First Lines