Review by Robert C. Jones
Whatever your opinion of Shakespeare's sonnets, this marvelous study by Helen Vendler will make you look at them with different eyes.
To Vendler's mind, current editorial and critical comments about Shakespeare's sonnets do not pay enough attention to the sonnets as poems. Rather, scholars and critics alike seem more interested in turning the sonnets into a novel, or a drama, featuring the Dark Lady, the Young Man and the Poet-Speaker with all the possible sexual and homosexual combinations and anxieties.
Vendler's antidote is to approach the sonnets from the vantage point of the poet who wrote them, asking the questions that a poet would ask about any poem: What was the aesthetic challenge for Shakespeare in writing these poems, of confining himself (with a few exceptions) to a single architectural form? What are their compositional motivations? What does a writer gain from working, over and over, in one subgenre? Her brief answer is that Shakespeare learned to find strategies to enact feeling in form, feelings in forms, multiplying both to a superlative degree through 154 poems.
Be forewarned: Vendler intends this work for those who already know the sonnets.
To try Vendler out, I consulted her commentary on Sonnet 116 (Let me not to the marriage of true minds), which, like many readers, I have read and admired as a sonnet of definition. Not so, says Helen Vendler: I read this poem as an example not of definition but of dramatic refutation or rebuttal. As I followed her complex and cogent reasoning, I found myself intrigued, captured and overwhelmed.
An accompanying compact disc, bound with the book, presents Vendler's readings of a selection of the poems and adds immeasurably to the impact of the study. Indeed, the more one hears the sonnets as Vendler hears them, the more one comes to realize that the fundamental act of a Shakespearean poem is to unfold itself in a developing dynamic of thought and feeling marked by a unifying play of mind and language.
The strength of Helen Vendler's study is that it so admirably echoes the art she seeks to understand.
©1998, ProMotion, inc.