The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets

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.