Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets

The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets

Vendler, Helen

Paperback

Literary CriticismPoetry Criticism

Publisher Price: $34.00

ISBN10: 0674637127
ISBN13: 9780674637122
Publisher: Belknap Press
Published: Nov 1 1999
Pages: 696
Weight: 2.40
Height: 1.29 Width: 6.54 Depth: 10.00
Language: English

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.

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