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.

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“A great achievement, the work of an author with an almost devout passion for good poems.” –Frank Kermode, New Republic “Criticism of the Sonnets, and by extension, critical accounts of poetry, will never be the same again.” –Tom Paulin, London Review of Books The definitive guide to Shakespeare’s Sonnets from the most accomplished critic of our time. More than four centuries after its initial publication, William Shakespeare’s Sonnets is still very much a living text. Despite all the regalia of its Elizabethan English, despite its baroque grammatical dislocations, Shakespeare’s major work of lyric poetry remains an inexhaustible source of literary wonder. In detailed commentaries on each of the 154 sonnets, Helen Vendler offers a lucid analysis of the verse stylings that we have come to call “Shakespearean.” The supreme accomplishment of these fourteen-line poems, Vendler demonstrates, lies not in their often-conventional themes and images–love and death, roses and thorns, summer’s heat and winter’s cold–nor in some hidden, deeper meaning, but in the seemingly effortless virtuosity of their arrangements. Shakespeare’s sly subversions, his boundless capacity for formal invention, and his uncanny ability to breathe life into even the most commonplace metaphors betray a poetic imagination that has never yet found its equal. Presented alongside both the original and the modernized texts, Vendler’s commentaries not only illuminate the sheer abundance of Shakespeare’s rhetorical strategies and his dynamic use of the sonnet form; they also reveal the sharp satire and scandalous irreverence that he directs toward everything from traditional sexual mores to Petrarchan views of love. Above all, Vendler provides an unparalleled view of a poetic mind at work, both Shakespeare’s and her own.