The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets

by Helen Vendler

Helen Vendler, widely regarded as an accomplished interpreter of poetry, here serves as a guide to some of the best-known poems in the English language.

In detailed commentaries on Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, Vendler interprets imaginative and stylistic features of the poems, pointing out new levels of import in particular lines, and the ways in which the four parts of each sonnet work together to enact emotion and create dynamic effect.

Genres: Poetry, Shakespeare, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Classics, Criticism, Literature

672 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1997

About the author

Helen Vendler is the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, where she received her PhD in English and American Literature in 1960. Before joining the Harvard faculty, Vendler taught at Cornell, Swarthmore, Haverford, Smith, and Boston University.



Vendler has written books on Yeats, Herbert, Keats, Stevens, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Heaney, and, most recently, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (2007), Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill (2010); Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries’ (2010); and The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry (2015). She also reviews contemporary poetry for the New Republic, London Review of Books, and other journals. She has held fellowships from, among others, the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Woodrow Wilson Center, and National Endowment for the Humanities, and is a member of the American Philosophical Society, American Academy of Arts and Letters, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Swedish Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Modern Language Association, of which she was president in 1980.

Reviews

[Amalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was just researching for my degree when I accidentally found this book. These analyses are extremely good and give the reader a unique perspective on Shakespeare’s sonnets. In short, Helen Vendler provides us with detailed commentaries on Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets with a modernized version (the original folio text is also included), with adjusted spelling and punctuation and presents the readers with a better understanding of the language and allows discovery of textual clues much clearly.

The sonnets are presented with details, containing diagrams, links between words and puns, meanings behind the quatrains and the couplets etc. Vendler also provides the connections between groups of sonnets (such as the "young lord" and the "dark lady" sonnets), far more compared with previous analyses I've read.

There is also a CD bound into the back cover of the book (the author reading a selection of the sonnets with her emphasis on rhythm and stress) providing readers to fully appreciate the beauty of these sonnets.

[Noreen · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a tie--who is more insane? Helen Vendler or Stephen Booth? Right now my money's on Vendler, but one more crazy sexual allusion from Booth and he might carry the day.

[James Dempsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sonnet 29:

When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate,
For thy sweet love rememb’red such wealth brings That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

I use this book both as my main copy of the sonnets and as a reference, but mainly, I find the brief (1-2 page) essays on each sonnet's structure fascinating and extremely enlightening. The essays also highlight Shakespeare's wordplay. I've never studied poetry in-depth, and this book has given me a greater appreciation for the technical side of the art as well as for the sonnets themselves.

Four stars because the book really scratches the surface. Still, I think any fan of Shakespeare should take a look at it.

[Andy Zhang · Rating 5 out of 5]

helen vendler is always empowering

[Jeremy]

I consulted this book when I taught a Shakespeare course in Fall 2020.

[Pilar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting and many times useful.

[Subashini · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deep and dense. Vendler lost her mind to Shakespeare and got incredible scholarly work out of it. A lot of it went over my head--the technical aspects of the language and meter, etc.-- but it was still illuminating to take the time to read each assessment of the sonnet. To be fair, this kind of immersion should be done over months, and I'd love to do so--if only this could be my full-time job.

[Josh Gravholt · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my goals for the year is to better “understand“ the Shakespearean sonnets, and their context. This book was quite good at helping with this goal and gave me a lot of valuable information. At this point. I feel like I understand Elizabeth English fairly well, but the sonnets certainly throw a wrench at that. My favorite is Sonnet 29, though I think that the dark lady sonnets are tortured, and thus the more I learn about them the more compelling they are.

[Lynn Weber · Rating 3 out of 5]

Vendler’s analysis is not really my cup of tea and I ended up skimming most of her commentary. However, I read the sonnets much better than I did before reading the book, so you can’t argue with results.

[Vinay · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 Stars for Shakespeare's Sonnets
4.5 Stars for Helen Vendler's insight

Helen Vendler's approach to the sonnets is through drama. It's about Shakespeare's use 14 lines sonnet for dramatic experimentation. He plays with the structure, word puns, images, sounds, volta, older English script, and most importantly octat-sestet structure. Helen Vendler's introduction and notes are amazing(even though at times they can be obscure). She comments about the arrangement of the sonnets and it's release.

I recommend listening to BBC's In Our Time episode on the sonnets.

Regards
Vinay A

[Uther Pendragon · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like the sonnets and want to be informed about them, and if you want to see what levels of ingenuity Shakespeare reached while composing them, read this book. But make no mistake, it is not the literary equivalent of Candy Land. It's a tough book.

Helen Vendler is a national treasure. She's our greatest living critic. A side fact: she has memorized everyone of Shakespeare's Sonnets.

I know there are certain types of people who hate her. Most of those people have never read anything she has written. They just follow their crowd and attack everything their crowd hates.

Here is a quote from the introduction on pages 16-17, last paragraph. If you're reading this, bear with me for a few moments (I'm on mobile, so I put single quotation marks around italicized words and phrases) :

'Allegations of misogyny have arisen with respect to Shakespeare's speaker's discourse about his mistress and about 'false women' (sonnet 20) in general. There is a philosophical impropriety in anachronistic reproaches to speakers of earlier centuries whose theological, ethical, and socially regulative concepts are alien to ours. But such accusations make us ask ourselves how we conceive an author's duty as a writer of lyric. As I see it, the poet's duty is to create aesthetically convincing representations of feelings felt and thoughts thought. Readers have certainly found the feelings and thoughts of Shakespeare's speaker with respect to his mistress convincingly represented. Whether or not we believe that such 'should' have been the speaker's feelings and thoughts is entirely irrelevant to the aesthetic success of the poem, as irrelevant as whether the fictive speaker 'should' have found himself sexually aroused by the knowledge that his mistress was promiscuous. Whether he should have experienced self-loathing once he discovered the motive for his arousal is equally irrelevant. What 'is' important, [. . .] is that Shakespeare discovered a newly complex system of expression . . . '

I've never met Helen Vendler and I'm certain I never will. I didn't get to go to college. I had to learn everything on my on, and for many years my without the internet, and without so much as a syllabus to show me what to study. In a lot of ways, it was catch as catch can for me.

Many people lash out at the things they don't agree with or they lash out at the things they dislike. But some people launch hateful ad hominem attacks, not because they genuinely disagree with the person (especially a person who Always has ample evidence to enforce every claim they ever make), but because what the person is saying makes them feel inferior, in other words: they sometimes attack a person because they do not understand what that person is trying to communicate to them.

I'm grateful for people like Helen Vendler. She doesn't pander. She reports the news as she sees it. I've learned many things from her books and essays. Her introductions to collections of poetry are unsurpassed and rarely paralleled.

I doubt that I will always agree with everything she has to say, but I certainly do not want her to disappear because of it. I didn't agree with 99% of everything Harold Bloom had to say, but I was still saddened when he passed. We lost someone special that day.

(And please, don't misunderstand me. I do not mean to suggest that anyone who dislikes or disagrees with Vendler is attacking her. That's not my intention. I'm just an unschooled literature enthusiast, rambling, hoping to make an interesting statement or two.)

I'm thankful to have discovered Helen Vendler. And I'm thankful I was still young enough to absorb as much information as I could from her works.

Here's a quote from Basil Bunting:

'Never explain. Your reader is as smart as you.'

And that's how Helen Vendler has operated throughout the entirety of her career. Personally, I wouldn't want it any other way. And to anyone who has read this far, I think you know what I mean, and I think you might agree.

This book is one of the handful of books that changed my life.

I will re-read it many times.

Here is the remainder of the Vendler quote, beginning with the sentence that has the [brackets]:

'What 'is' important, for the advance of the representational powers of lyric as it historically evolved, is that Shakespeare discovered a newly complex system of expression, unprecedented in the Renaissance lyric, through which he could, accurately and convincingly, represent and enact that arousal and that self-loathing--just as he had found strategic ways in the first subsequence to represent and enact his speaker's abject infatuation with a beautiful face. The ethics of lyric writing lies in the accuracy of its representation of the feelings of inner life, and in that alone. Shakespeare's duty as a poet of the inner life was not to be fair to women but to be accurate in the representation of the feelings of his speaker. If the fictive speaker is a man tormented by his self-enslavement to a flagrantly unfaithful mistress, we can scarcely expect from him, at this moment, a judiciousness about women. The "poetic justice" of the sequence comes in the objectivity of Shakespeare's representation of his speaker in all his irrationality and wildness of language.'

Be warned, below this is a rant. If you read it, you probably won't agree with it:

And that quote is one reason why certain types of people hate Vendler. Unfortunately, at some point in the last 25 years or so we lost that duty she is talking about: the duty of telling the truth in your writing, which by the way, is something every "how to" book about writing tells you to do. Maybe it's because many people these days think they're a writer just because they have a computer in their pocket now. And those people know less than nothing about being an actual author. Obviously, I'm not talking about everyone. And by "less than nothing" I mean those particular people have some very specific and very harmful notions of what writing is, should be, must be and will be in the future.

For example, it's gotten to the point that the people I'm talking about think every instance of "I" in a poem is automatically the poet. That's not always true. And they expect you to stay in your lane or be cancelled, meaning: you are not allowed to write anything from the point of view of a person who is "not your type of person" but at the same time you are attacked if you *don't* include a mix of people.

If you read this and don't agree or if you wonder whether I'm right or wrong, I invite you to do your own research, please. Don't just take my word for it. Some people are having their works removed for not "staying in their lane". Many people are forced to issue apologies (mostly because a bunch of trolls, who don't even care one way or another, have two dozen fake profiles, complete with pictures. They create a stink, by posting things many times, so it looks like thousands of people are outraged. They just want to see what they can cause. . . .

Anyway: I doubt you read all of this, but I'll apologize anyway for the rant. Sorry.

[M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb practical criticism. I also can't believe nobody in the past 400 years noticed that couplet tie trick before her - amazing.

[Steven Andersson]

Vendler packs her books with insightful commentary on poetry. This is a valuable companion to Shakespeare's sonnets.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book: The Art of Shakespeare′s Sonnets
Author: Helen Vendler
Publisher: ‎ Harvard University Press; Reprint edition (30 September 1999)
Language: ‎ English
Paperback: ‎ 686 pages
Item Weight: ‎ 1 kg 80 g
Dimensions: ‎ 16.61 x 3.28 x 25.4 cm
Country of Origin: ‎ United Kingdom
Price: 3240/-

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.” ― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

This is one book that you need coming back to. Over and over again, customarily, continually….

The fabulous appeal of Shakespeare's sonnet through the centuries rests fundamentally on the same qualities that have made his plays unforgettable -- his outstanding empathy for the workings of the human mind and his farfetched ability to distil many aspects of human experience into a a small number of lines.

The sonnets are, in many ways, dramatic poetry; the reader is continuously aware of the presence of the poet, the "I" of the sequence, who addresses the nobleman and the dark lady persuasively and openly, not as if he were musing in his study.

A brief perusal of the opening lines of the sonnets shows a remarkable number of questions and commands that heighten the reader's sense of a dramatic situation:

Thou hast her, it is not all my grief,
And yet it may be said I lov'd her dearly...

Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?

Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing
And like enough thou know'st thy estimate………….

Would you like to know what message you’d primarily carry from this book?

This:

The bard’s compression of language; the vivid images drawn from nature; commerce; the theatre and many other aspects of life; the wordplay; and the flexibility of rhythms of speech – are the essential paradigms that characterise his blank verse. All of these contribute to the greatness of his sonnets.

In his poems, as in his plays, he is able to transform traditional forms and raise them to new, almost untouchable heights.

Read this book at least once in your life guys…..

[Brad Eastman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't really read fiction, much less poetry, but I am making my way through the complete works of Shakespeare by reading a little at a time. I spent the last year going through the Sonnets, which were very difficult for me. I used Ms. Vendler's book as a guide as she analyzes each sonnet. At first, like any other work, I was simply looking for meaning. Ms. Vendler helped in that search by explaining allusions I never would have seen. At her best, however, Ms. Venander showed me the word and aural play in the Sonnets that I would have never been able to spot on my own. I would frequently read a sonnet, then read her analysis and go back and read the sonnet again. I was amazed at how much more feeling I found in them after reading the analysis. I did not rate this work higher because it is not for the faint of heart. The language is very academic, written for folks who have a vocabulary from studying for the SAT and already familiar with poetry analysis - not me. I will say that I have been reading Shakespeare's works in the Norton Third Edition of his complete works, and the analysis there is way too cursory. I needed something far closer to Ms. Vendler's analysis, but written for undergraduates who are not majoring in literature.

[Kevin Fitzpatrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterfully explicated by an author (Helen Vendler) in full command of her resources, "The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets" takes its reader into the consciousness and world of William Shakespeare as he explores, through the English language, the human experience in all its complexity. However, the sequence, along with the trenchant commentary that supports it, is not only significant for its content, but also because its techniques, clearly explained by the author, explode all previous explorations/utilizations of the English language. Added to the worth of the poems is the author's commentary, which is lucid, truthful, and concise, making for fruitful interpretations without extraneous theorizing. If one wishes to experience poetry in its best sense, and if one wants often difficult poems to be explained clearly and simply, read this book: you will be well rewarded!

[Jess Wier]

I’ve read this book twice now for grad school, and due to my ambivalence towards the sonnets, I have chosen not to rate it. However, I commend Vendler for her research and commentary regarding the sonnets as individuals and parts of a larger sequence. Her in-depth analysis is thought provoking, regardless of your stance/interest in the works of Shakespeare, and expertly demonstrates her knowledge and research on both Shakespeare and the late 16th- early 17th century

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.7 stars
A monument of literary critique and analysis. A mind-boggling array of detail and cross-reference. Heady stuff (sometimes over mine) that challenges one's intellect in a meaty deep-lit fashion.

"... the mark of any good poem is to be surprising." H. Vendler.

[Candace Sinclair · Rating 4 out of 5]

I used this book for my research paper on sonnet 48.

[fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inspirational.

[verd · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Andrew Pitkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vendler is an important critic, and her work on the Sonnets of Shakespeare is great for explaining the broad scope of each sonnet, as well as adding her own twist.

Vendler to me has written far more inspired criticism, but this is still quite good. She delves deep into the characters of the Sequence, and posits several great ideas about the sonnets and Shakespeare's battle with the form, and masterful inversions of the form. One thing that is made clear here is that each sonnet expresses just how powerful Shakespeare's command of English was - the man literally broke barriers here.

All in all, I wish she had focussed more on different themes, devices, or explorations as a frame for her book. I find that some of the analyses are not as inspired as others. But it is Vendler, so it's very good!

[mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

genial perfeito maravilhoso.

[Syd Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a must read for anyone interested in furthering their understanding of Shakespeare's sonnets.
The format of the book is very useful. The original text (with original spelling) stands on the left side, while the new translation/interpretation stands on the other side. This makes it very easy to make connections between the original language and possible meanings in each sonnet.
The author explores themes, characters, and interpretations in thoughtful and extensive essays immediately following the sonnets.
I have read other books exploring the content of Shakespeare's sonnets, but found this one the most grounded and easy to follow.

I would definitely recommend this book to a friend.

[zyaff · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets by Helen Vendler is a deeply insightful and beautifully written exploration of the Bard’s most intimate works. Her close readings bring out layers of meaning, rhythm, and emotion I never noticed before. It’s both scholarly and readable, perfect for anyone who wants to truly understand the artistry behind Shakespeare’s language. Helen’s love and respect for the sonnets shine through every page. A brilliant companion for anyone revisiting or discovering these poems.

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just began reading this book and I will probably be reading it a year from now--not straight through but a chapter or two at a time while reading and re-reading the sonnets she covers although Reading it straight through would be like taking an advanced class in how to read a poem.

This is close reading as it should be, concentrating on the rhetoric, language, recurring imagery and sheer, boundless technique of the poems.

A delightful book.

[Kekuni Minton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. Feel like I'm taking the literature class that i really wanted to take but didn't get a chance to. Vendler really helps look at poetry from different time periods. The modern poetical slant toward sharing an intimate moment in a stream of consciousness is not the renaissance way, with its strict structure, rhythm, and rhyme scheme. Yet the sonnets feel alive and very intimate in another way (philosophical?).......

[Jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a more rigorous treatment of the poems; each one is attached with a mini-essay, which touch on style, structure, philosophy, etc. The quality of the essays is a bit uneven, but it's still a worthwhile read.

[Kitty · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a course on Shakespeare's sonnets, we were advised to read Vendler to both start and polish a half hour analysis on one sonnet. Fascinating and a wonderful introduction to the rich play of language, both in details of sound and meaning, as well as syntax.