The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Belknap) - Softcover

Vendler, Helen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674637127 ISBN 13: 9780674637122

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1999

Synopsis

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."

About this title

Review:

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.--Frank Kermode "New Republic "

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.--Gregory Feeley "Philadelphia Inquirer "

Reading the sonnets knowing that Ms. Vendler is about to have her say serves to sharpen your awareness of the poetry considerably. In fact, with her reading over your shoulder, so to speak, you see deeper into the poetry than ever before. Each essay forces you to reread the sonnet under discussion and come a little closer to understanding this guy Shakespeare in the poem.--Christopher Lehmann-Haupt "New York Times "

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.--Teresa Berry "Library Journal "

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 "

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.--Tom Mayo"Dallas Morning News" (02/01/2004)

Helen Vendler discloses, with great patience and ingenuity, how similarly adequate to the perceived splendor and urgency of the sonnets are their rhetorical conventions, devices that "work" as multifariously for lyric poetry as the stage contrivances of the Elizabethan (and Jacobean) theater did for the plays...Vendler is confident that "the sonnets will remain intelligible, moving and beautiful to contemporary and future readers." They will, if such readers also read Vendler's book. For hers is the most intricately inquiring and ingeniously responding study of these poems yet to be undertaken...Hers will prove to be the most valuable critical performance in recent American literature on classic texts...The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets is an authentic act of contemporary criticism as well as a reading of the most cherished lyric poetry in the English language. It constitutes a ground of poetic apprehension that cannot be gainsaid, and it offers the opportunity to enjoy the art of poetry where we all agree it must be found, as one enjoys most what one understands best.--Richard Howard "New York Times Book Review "

[The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets] adds enormously to our understanding and prods us to continue to make our own discoveries...[It] grafts new feathers onto the wings of our understanding, lifting us closer to Heaven's gate, and it once more confirms Vendler's status as one of the smartest critics around.--Jay Ragoff "Books in Review "

[Best of 1998 issue]
If you are a writer who still uses English words (rather than chockablock bricks of jargon), this is the book for you. Professor Vendler takes Shakespeare's sonnets one by one and word by word. She talks about what poems do and how they do it--their architecture, narrative, music, and language--so, along with the aperçus and sharp insights, there are nifty charts and graphs. There is also a CD of Vendler reading the sonnets aloud [available with the hardcover edition only], lest we forget that words are noise as well as ink

--Dave Hickey "Artforum "

Helen Vendler...has produced here what is probably the least irrelevant and most critically illuminating of all extended commentaries on the Sonnets.--John Bayley "New York Review of Books "

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0674637127
• ISBN 13: 9780674637122
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 686