The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare's Poetry (Cambridge Introductions to Literature) - Softcover

Schoenfeldt, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 052170507X ISBN 13: 9780521705073

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2010

Synopsis

Shakespeare's poems, aside from the enduring appeal of the Sonnets, are much less familiar today than his plays, despite being enormously popular in his lifetime. This Introduction celebrates the achievement of Shakespeare as a poet, providing students with ways of understanding and enjoying his remarkable poems. It honours the aesthetic and intellectual complexity of the poems without making them seem unapproachably complicated, outlining their exquisite pleasures and absorbing enigmas. Schoenfeldt suggests that today's readers are better able to analyze aspects of the poems that were formerly ignored or the source of scandal - the articulation of a fervent same-sex love, for example, or the incipient racism inherent in a hierarchy of light and dark. By engaging closely with Shakespeare's major poems - 'Venus and Adonis', 'Lucrece', 'The Phoenix and the Turtle', the Sonnets and 'A Lover's Complaint' - the Introduction demonstrates how much these extraordinary poems still have to say to us.

About this title

Product Description

An approachable and engaging guide to Shakespeare's poetry, this volume provides students with ways to understand and appreciate the poems.

Review

"Schoenfeldt's volume has all the merits of a first-rate lecture series. It provides the facts, engages judiciously with current scholarship, and models exacting readings of target texts."
--Recent Studies of the English Renaissance

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 052170507X
• ISBN 13: 9780521705073
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 174