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, ...
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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. Vendler's understanding of the sonnets informs her readings on an accompanying compact disk, which is bound with the book. This recorded presentation of a selection of the poems, in giving aural form to Shakespeare's words, aims to heighten the reader's awareness of voice in lyric, and adds the dimension of sound to poems too often registered merely as written words.
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Add this copy of The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets to cart. $54.32, very good condition, Sold by HPB-Diamond rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Dallas, TX, UNITED STATES, published 1997 by Belknap Press.
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Add this copy of The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets to cart. $54.32, good condition, Sold by Book Alley rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Pasadena, CA, UNITED STATES, published 1997 by Belknap Press.
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Good jacket. A good hardcover in a good dust jacket. Bottom of spine bumped/ soiled with other typical wear around the edges. No internal markings, binding is tight. Includes CD which is still sealed.
Add this copy of The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets to cart. $63.86, new condition, Sold by GridFreed rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from North Las Vegas, NV, UNITED STATES, published 1997 by Belknap Press.
Add this copy of The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets Vendler, Helen to cart. $70.34, new condition, Sold by belskiy rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from alexandria, VA, UNITED STATES, published 1997 by Belknap Press.
Add this copy of The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets to cart. $107.70, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 1997 by Belknap Press.
Add this copy of The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets to cart. $165.57, new condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 1997 by Belknap Press.
Helen Vendler, in addition to indirectly giving the language the verb "to vendle", is one of the best literary critics working today. An extremely acute close reader, alert to nuance, structure, context, content to stay with the work and not to use it as a springboard for grand generalizations, she manages to make what can be an overwhelming welter of seemingly similar poems available instead as a collection of individual gems, each of them revealing with a beauty densely great the movements of one man's exemplary mind. She makes Shakespeare close without reducing him to the familiar. His strangeness is the useful strangeness of all great work, not that of another culture, another time, another language.
Reading this inspired me to memorize many of the sonnets (I now have a shifting collection of nineteen, some of which sometimes squirt away from capture, others of which stay docilely in place.)
Her own reading, on the CD which accompanies the hard-cover version, is modest, accurate, not over-defined; one realizes that there are no definitive readings, only readings more or less honest.
