The Year's Contributions to Shakespeare Studies 1 - Critical Studies

Summary

Probably the most important contribution to Shakespeare studies to appear within the last year is Helen Vendler’s The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which includes two full texts (a facsimile of the 1609 edition and a modernized version). Commentaries are printed following individual poems, and the book comes with a CD-ROM of Vendler’s own readings of just under half of them. Vendler’s rationale for offering yet another account of the Sonnets is that previous editors have not paid enough attention to them as poems, ‘that is, as a writer’s projects invented to amuse and challenge his own capacity for inventing artworks’. Citing W. H. Auden’s insistence that a poem is primarily a ‘verbal contraption’, she argues that lyric poems have ‘almost no significant freight of “meaning” at all, in our ordinary sense of the word’ and aims to direct attention forcefully back towards poetic form. For Vendler the poet’s duty is the creation of ‘aesthetically convincing representations of feelings felt and thoughts thought’, and it is not the nature of those thoughts and feelings but the ways in which they are expressed that are the appropriate area of interest for the literary critic. This is straightforward and persuasive.