"The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets" by Helen Vendler is a superb
close reading of the sonnets one by one. It is also an invaluable
master class on how to read a poem, how to attend to the patterns
of sound within a poem, how to explore the way in which sense and
sound combine in the sonnets.--Colm Toibin "Times Literary
Supplement "
["The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets" is] a heady journey into the
sounds, structures, and strategies of the sonnets, led by a guide
as perceptive and rigorously instructive as one could wish
for...Anyone glancing at just a few of the essays will benefit from
Vendler's microscopic examinations. To read the book from start to
finish, however, is to receive a thorough education in how to look
at a poem. One feels that when Shakespeare wrote the line, 'A
liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass, ' he hoped one day for a
reader who would see in this image what Vendler sees: 'the
emotionally labile contents of any sonnet as they preserve their
mobility within the transparent walls of prescribed length, meter,
and rhyme.' This outstanding work of criticism has made those walls
and what lies behind them very clear.--Robert Atwan "Boston 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 "
[A] magisterial work...[and] an invaluable contribution to the
serious study of Shakespeare's sonnets by a preeminent critic of
lyric poetry, widely viewed as the best close reader of poetry
writing today.--Michael Shinagel"Harvard Review" (05/01/2005)
[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 "
[Featured in "The Globe 100" for 1998]Vendler stresses
Shakespeare's hyperconsciousness as a writer, a quality she seems
to share. She approaches her detailed study with the utter
scrupulousness of a true scholar, explicating the poems as poems.
Her strict emphasis on poetics and her thoroughness separate her
study from its predecessors.--Philippa Sheppard "Toronto Globe and
Mail "
From time to time, a work of criticism appears that promises to
inaugurate a new phase of the art...Roland Barthes, Paul de Man,
Stephen Greenblatt: each heralded, in different ways, a paradigm
shift in critical practice. And now Helen Vendler...makes a bold
attempt to change criticism again. Her ambitious "chef d'oeuvre,"
the fruit of decades of memorizing and meditating on Shakespeare's
"Sonnets," significantly takes the form of a critical
commentary...She has chosen her topic strategically. The "Sonnets"
is the supreme lyric masterpiece in English, yet, although often
edited, it has been neglected critically, as if too challenging and
demanding, too dangerous for direct response. Yet Vendler's
originality goes further. For she has decided to return criticism
to the study of art; to the sort of response that leads to
appreciative evaluation rather than manipulation...The rapid
adumbration of Shakespeare's variety is as brilliant as anything
Vendler has written. But in commenting on e
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 poe
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 "
Helen Vendler's long study of the art of Shakespeare's "Sonnets" is
that purely aesthetic study of poetic language in action...Reading
it is like being offered a huge plate of oysters, or doing a
Spot-the-Ball competition, or playing obsessively with a Rubik's
Cube that always comes out right after the effort of following a
tight technical argument...It is Vendler's supreme critical virtue
that she can write from inside a poem, as if she is in the workshop
witnessing its making...Again and again, I want to haul out
examples of this supreme critical imagination at work, but it
should be apparent that criticism of the "Sonnets", and by
extension, critical accounts of poetry, will never be the same
again. This is an epic, innovatory study which ought to mark a new
beginning for criticism.--Tom Paulin "London Review of Books "
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 "
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)
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 "
This eagerly awaited work has been nine years coming, an
understandable period considering the magnitude of Helen Vendler's
project...In her valuable introduction, Vendler declares that the
sonnets represent "the largest tract of unexamined Shakespearean
lines left open to scrutiny." Readers like me, who thought they
were relatively familiar with these poems, will discover just how
unfamiliar their various sequences turn out to be...It is
consistent with Vendler's total immersion in the sonnets that she
has learned them all by heart, as an enabling means of support for
the 'evidential' criticism--in which "instant and sufficient
linguistic evidence" is produced to back up every critical
remark--she so unfailingly and brilliantly practices.--William H.
Pritchard "Boston Sunday Globe "
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 "
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 "
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 "
[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 aper us 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"
[Featured in "The Globe 100" for 1998] Vendler stresses
Shakespeare's hyperconsciousness as a writer, a quality she seems
to share. She approaches her detailed study with the utter
scrupulousness of a true scholar, explicating the poems as poems.
Her strict emphasis on poetics and her thoroughness separate her
study from its predecessors. -- Philippa Sheppard "Toronto Globe
and Mail"
With admirable self-reliance and hardly a glance at the main stream
of historical and gender-studies criticism, the famed Harvard
professor reads the poems pragmatically, as 'verbal contraptions, '
explaining how and why they work the way they do. The result is not
just a few brilliant perceptions about, say, Shakespeare's use of
cliches or chiasmus (although those are here), but the best
teachers' edition on the market. Vendler's preface, and the essays
that accompany each sonnet...will make a nearly perfect
introduction for college students--or for anyone else who wants to
learn how to read the poems for their skill and originality.
"Sonnets," and by extension, critical accounts of poetry, will
never be the same again. This is an epic, innovatory study which
ought to mark a new beginning for criticism.
complex verse: readings whose perspicuity and accuracy will form a
solid basis for many more.
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.
diligently, even stringently, employs her technical surveys, and
what emerges from beneath their grid is surprising, substantial,
evanescent.
evidence" is produced to back up every critical remark--she so
unfailingly and brilliantly practices.
just the book for anybody wishing to spend a little quality time
with our greatest poet.
of a true scholar, explicating the poems as poems. Her strict
emphasis on poetics and her thoroughness separate her study from
its predecessors.
of Vendler reading the sonnets aloud [available with the hardcover
edition only], lest we forget that words are noise as well as
ink
our understanding, lifting us closer to Heaven's gate, and it once
more confirms Vendler's status as one of the smartest critics
around.
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.
preface, and the essays that accompany each sonnet...will make a
nearly perfect introduction for college students--or for anyone
else who wants to learn how to read the poems for their skill and
originality.
the patterns of sound within a poem, how to explore the way in
which sense and sound combine in the sonnets.
A few pages of this marvelous study convince us that "no poet ever
found more linguistic forms to replicate human responses than
Shakespeare in the "Sonnets,""
Ý"The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets" is¨ a heady journey into the
sounds, structures, and strategies of the sonnets, led by a guide
as perceptive and rigorously instructive as one could wish
for...Anyone glancing at just a few of the essays will benefit from
Vendler's microscopic examinations. To read the book from start to
finish, however, is to receive a thorough education in how to look
at a poem. One feels that when Shakespeare wrote the line, 'A
liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass, ' he hoped one day for a
reader who would see in this image what Vendler sees: 'the
emotionally labile contents of any sonnet as they preserve their
mobility within the transparent walls of prescribed length, meter,
and rhyme.' This outstanding work of criticism has made those walls
and what lies behind them very clear. -- Robert Atwan "Boston
Review"
Ý"The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets"¨ adds enormously to our
understanding and prods us to continue to make our own
discoveries...ÝIt¨ 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"
ÝA¨ magisterial work...Ýand¨ an invaluable contribution to the
serious study of Shakespeare's sonnets by a preeminent critic of
lyric poetry, widely viewed as the best close reader of poetry
writing today. -- Michael Shinagel "Harvard Review"
(05/01/2005)
ÝFeatured in "The Globe 100" for 1998¨ Vendler stresses
Shakespeare's hyperconsciousness as a writer, a quality she seems
to share. She approaches her detailed study with the utter
scrupulousness of a true scholar, explicating the poems as poems.
Her strict emphasis on poetics and her thoroughness separate her
study from its predecessors. -- Philippa Sheppard "Toronto Globe
and Mail"
Close readings that train a brilliant spotlight on Shakespeare's
poetic performance...A celebrated and prolific critic, reviewer,
and lecturer on poetry, Vendler offers an illuminating companion
for Bardolators of all levels and stripes...Vendler analyzes each
sonnet in turn (they appear in both original and modernized
formats), explicating in an accessible manner the structures that
organize them...An immensely enriching account of Shakespeare's
complex verse: readings whose perspicuity and accuracy will form a
solid basis for many more.
Vendler has lived with these works all her life, and spent much of
the past nine years working on this hefty book. The result is more
than a reliable guide, it is a portable critical encyclopedia...In
short, this is just the book for anybody wishing to spend a little
quality time with our greatest poet.
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