The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Book & CD-Rom edition) - Hardcover

Vendler, Helen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674637119 ISBN 13: 9780674637115

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1997

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

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.--Mona Simpson "Los Angeles Times "

About the Author:

Helen Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0674637119
• ISBN 13: 9780674637115
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 686