The Sonnets and Narrative Poems - the Complete Non-Dramatic Poetry

by William Shakespeare, Sylvan Barnet (Editor)

With an introduction by W.H. Auden and commentary from Helen Vendler, among others, this volume presents all of Shakeseare's non-dramatic poetry in one place.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Shakespeare, Fiction, Literature, British Literature, Romance

448 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner ("sharer") of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men after the ascension of King James VI and I of Scotland to the English throne. At age 49 (around 1613), he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs, and even certain fringe theories as to whether the works attributed to him were written by others.
Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best works produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608, among them Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in the English language. In the last phase of his life, he wrote tragicomedies (also known as romances) and collaborated with other playwrights.
Many of Shakespeare's plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. However, in 1623, John Heminge and Henry Condell, two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare's, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works that includes 36 of his plays. Its Preface was a prescient poem by Ben Jonson, a former rival of Shakespeare, that hailed Shakespeare with the now famous epithet: "not of an age, but for all time".

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

If thou survive my well-contented day,
When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover,
And shalt by fortune once more re-survey
These poor rude lines of thy deceased lover,
Compare them with the bettering of the time,
And though they be outstripp'd by every pen,
Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme,
Exceeded by the height of happier men.
O, then vouchsafe me but this loving thought:
'Had my friend's Muse grown with this growing age,
A dearer birth than this his love had brought,
To march in ranks of better equipage:
But since he died, and poets better prove,
Theirs for their style I'll read, his for his love.'

- William Shakespeare, 1590-ish (disputed)

There once was a young man called Will,
Who couldn't be happy until,
He'd written a sonnet,
And spent hours upon it,
Only then could he kick back and chill...

- Me, yesterday (undisputed, alas)

OK, well I'm not actually going to try to review the whole of Shakespeare's poetic output, obviously. I'm not nearly qualified enough to do so. Instead, I'll just say that the bard is one of my favourite poets. His work has resonated with me since I first studied it at school and I've returned to it time and again over the years. Actually, the fact that I know it so well enables me to just kick back and read it for pure, unadulterated pleasure, without the slightest taint of academia clawing away at my mind. Bliss.

P.S. - At this stage, I am entirely bored of the whole 'did somebody else write Shakespeare's work?' and 'did Shakespeare even exist?' arguments. Yawwwn. The work exists, somebody wrote it, it was so long ago that the identity of the author doesn't actually matter anymore except to the most pedantic, tedious academics. If you really must keep banging on about these issues, do me a favour and do it underneath somebody else's review... I just want to enjoy the work.

[itsdanixx · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, plus his six other poems: A Lovers Complaint, The Passionate Pilgrim, Phoenix and Turtle, The Rape of Lucrece, To the Queen and Venus and Adonis.

I definitely liked the sonnets far better than the other poems.

My favourite sonnet was number 27:

“Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired,
But then begins a journey in my head
To work my mind, when body’s work’s expired;
For then my thoughts (from far where I abide)
Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,
And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,
Looking on darkness which the blind do see;
Save that my soul’s imaginary sight
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,
Which like a jewel hung in ghastly night,
Makes black night beauteous, and her old face new.
Lo thus by day my limbs, by night my mind,
For thee, and for myself, no quiet find.”

[RL · Rating 4 out of 5]

I drifted through several lovely summer mornings lazing with this book in a suburban wilderness (local park). Paired with the inevitably blooming atmosphere, the poems and sonnets just seem so much more impressive in hindsight. I can look back on those moments reading this anthology and feel a pleasant postcoitalesque literary glow. Every page of this book is covered with notes, and several poems and sonnets are even highlighted. I don't think I've ever appreciated poetry this much, and I doubt I ever will. This goes out to the bard for writing some badass stuff.

Sonnets: Overall - 4 Stars
Venus and Adonis - 5 Stars
The Rape of Lucrece - 4.5 Stars
The Passionate Pilgrim - 4.8 Stars
"To the Queen" - 3 Stars
Let the Bird of Loudest Lay (The Phoenix and the Turtle) - 4 Stars
A Lover's Complaint - 3.5 Stars

[Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the poems but my god were some of the sonnets underwhelming...repetitive too but it could be my fault for entering relatively uneducated in the world of Shakespeare. Some sentences are just pure genius too though!

[Alicia · Rating 5 out of 5]

If Willy Shakes doesn’t raise the bar for romance whoever will? Always enamored by the bard and his witticisms. These sonnets will linger on in my head for quite some time. Specifically sonnets 10, 18, 40, 102 and 109.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've dipped into Shakespeare's sonnets in the past but this is the first time I've read the whole sequence through, completely and in order - and I'm underwhelmed, especially in comparison to the superlative Astrophil and Stella by Sidney which kicked off the whole sonnet craze in the 1580s. By the time Shakespeare starts writing his own sequence (or mini sequences?) in c.1593, the sonnet craze is not just over but clichéd so this is, in part, a self-conscious attempt to re-open something that is literarily 'done'. Ending with Cupid poems, for example, which conventionally start a sequence, attempts to shake up the form, but it feels a bit half-hearted.

The sequence as a whole is fairly repetitive as it works through its phases: the 'reproductive' sonnets written to a beautiful male friend ('the master mistress of my passion'), poems about the ravages of time, of memorialisation either through a child or poetry. There's a little flurry of excitement when the friend betrays the poet-narrator giving rise to some jealousy poems, offset later by their obverse as the poet-narrator betrays the friend.

The later section (from 127 ff.) transfers the poet-narrator's obsession to a female mistress, conventionally cruel and beautiful ('For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright | Who art as black as hell, as dark as night'). Perhaps the most interesting development is the explicit triangulation of desire when the poet-narrator accuses the friend and mistress of being lovers ('But being both from me, both to each friend | I guess one angel in another's hell', where 'hell' is Renaissance slang for 'vagina').

Throughout there is smutty word-play ('spent', 'will', 'hell') and some misogynistic slut-shaming ('Will will fulfil the treasure of thy love | Ay, fill it full with wills, and my will one') but the sonnet form is overwhelmingly conventional with little variation in prosody, content or poetic form.

So, am I glad that I've read these? Yes. But the individual sonnets and the sequence overall is a very poor cousin to the cleverness, narrative sophistication, variety, experimentation and sheer virtuosity of Astrophil and Stella.

[Tumblyhome (Caroline) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been slowly reading the sonnets starting with one and going through to 154, which I read last night.

I really loved some, liked some and admit I really did not like some too . Sometimes it seemed too big a project to read them all but then an amazing sonnet would come along and I was all enthused again. Reading them all took months.

Admittedly some of the sonnets were just too difficult to understand (and I really tried ).
Reading these is not a quick process, but taking time with them often uncovers gold. I used an excellent Helen Vendler book (The art of Shakespeares Sonnets) to help and also listened to @sirpatstew reading them aloud. If I got stuck the website Poemanalysis.com was really helpful. The RSC edition of the book of sonnets is excellent with good notes too.
It became a reading habit, picking up my tatty, annotated to death, scuffed and battered edition…a habit that I will really miss. So I will slowly read them again.

I ended up with quite a few favourite’s. I loved 73 &74, 29, 138, 129, 126, 109 and 113

[Bettie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nation's Favourite Poems: features in a 1996 nationwide poll compilation.

From wiki - Sonnet 18, often alternately titled Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?, is one of the best-known of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. In the sonnet, the poet compares his beloved to the summer season, and argues that his beloved is better. The poet also states that his beloved will live on forever through the words of the poem. Scholars have found parallels within the poem to Ovid's Tristia and Amores, both of which have love themes. Sonnet 18 is written in the typical Shakespearean sonnet form, having 14 lines of iambic pentameter ending in a rhymed couplet. Detailed exegeses have revealed several double meanings within the poem, giving it a greater depth of interpretation.

[GoldGato · Rating 5 out of 5]

It would be rather silly of me to review these Shakespearean poems. The language is magnificent, and I don't really get involved in the 'shadiness' of the Fair Youth. It's enough that I've had the joy of reading these eloquent demonstrations of love and yearning, one of those a-ha confirmations of life's beauty.

This specific volume is an oldie, being printed in 1901. I have almost killed it, resulting in bookcover surgery. The publishers included a lovely little glossary plus a preface to each work and fitted the book to smaller dimensions. A gem.

Book Season = Year Round (words are easy like the wind)

[Nicky · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never thought much about Shakespeare, or really tried to investigate his writing beyond the plays I was forced to read, which is a shame. His sonnets are lovely, and some of them are supremely clever. I love the inversions in sonnet 130, for example, and the sting in the tail of sonnet 18, "shall I compare thee to a summer's day"...

[katerina · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5/5*

[Kyriakos Sorokkou]

Κριτική και στα ελληνικά στις βιβλιοαλχημείες


750 pages of Shakespearean language. It's almost a herculean labour.
My ocd was glad last year when on Shakespeare's day (April 23) I visited his Globe theatre in London and bought this book.

It took me ten days to finish it but for a subject like this it was a fast pace.

This volume contains all of Shakespeare's poetry. His two epic/narrative poems: Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.
Then we have an anthology of 20 poems mainly sonnets that was published in 1599 and was attributed to Shakespeare even though 5 of them are by Shakespeare, 11 of unknown authorship and the rest 4 to other poets including Christopher Marlowe.
Who was born 2 months before Shakespeare and died at the age of 29 producing only 6 plays and a few poems.
Shakespeare on the other hand, died at the ripe age of 52 with 39 plays and already an important playwright.

What made Shakespeare more well-known than Marlowe was not only his longer life and longer play production but also the fact that during the years of 1592/93 there was a plague epidemic which was the reason to shut off all theatres.
So the actor Shakespeare decided to spend his long free time writing plays.
So when in June of 1594 the theatres reopened they started producing his plays and from then on he was going to be the most well known playwright of all time.

Of course during the plague times along with the plays he was writing his two epic poems: Venus and Adonis with 1194 lines, and The Rape of Lucrece with 1855 lines.
The first poem tells the story of the passionate love (and lust let's not deny it) of Venus for the young beautiful Adonis.
To me her love for an almost underage Adonis felt like a rape from a milf/cougar.

Indeed Elizabethan poetry had none of the prudeness and the puritanical modesty of Victorian poetry. It would take at least 400 years for poetry to get rid of this black prude veil.

In the second poem we have a Roman aristocrat who as the title says is raped by Tarquinius and she commits suicide to save her name and atone her honour. Questionable act for today's standards.
Of course in the end we have the catharsis where we have the punishment of Tarquinius and his family.

After these two epic poems what follow are as I mentioned earlier the poetry anthology The Passionate Pilgrim and then probably the only poem by Shakespeare which is neither a sonnet or a narrative/epic one. It is a 67 lines poem that tells the love story between two birds; a phoenix and a turtle(dove).

Then we have the 154 sonnets of Shakespeare, and the collection ends with a narrative/bucolic poem of 329 lines, as well as 18 short poems and epitaphs attributed to Shakespeare in the 17th century.

Shakespeare's 154 sonnets are his most well known from his poetry. They were written between 1591-1604 and were published in 1609, and it's not known whether they were published with Shakespeare's permission or not.

126 of these sonnets are addressing a youth, sometimes giving an advice like father to son, sometimes with an homoerotic vibe, and some of them are about the youth's betrayal towards the poet by being seduced by the Dark lady. Some also have as their theme a rival poet.

Of course saying that this passion and love were bisexual or homosexual is a bit anachronistic since they didn't exist exactly as they exist nowadays.

Of course this is a long discussion that sometimes ruins the enjoyment of reading or listening to a poem.

All poems besides the sonnets have extensive footnotes where everything in the poem is analysed.
The sonnets have on the facing page their own extensive notes. Plus the 170 pages of introduction at the beginning, and the index at the end this is an ideal edition both for those who want to study Shakespeare's poetry in depth, and both for those who just want to enjoy it.

[lily ⊹ · Rating 5 out of 5]

[5] ✦

[Robert · Rating 1 out of 5]

Excluding the two major narrative poems:

Snooze. It's not bad, just boring. These days only two kinds of people genuinely like these; those who can cope with Love and the Moon poetry, which, thematically, has been losing ground on my attention since I became an adult and those who are obsessed with Shakespeare's life, biographical and/or psychological, who were satirised up to the eyeballs by Oscar Wilde. I don't have that obsession.

The best part is the epitaphs, which are at least witty.

[aimee · Rating 2 out of 5]

the fact that i had to get a translator up to be able to understand this shows how great I am at english. my favourite sonnets were 18 and 81, solely because they reminded me of the bastille song "poet".
would I read these again? no. but does it make me look smart that I have read it? definitely, yes.

[Douglas Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good.

[Maude Levesque · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rip Shakespeare, you would have loved Cornelia Street, Ivy, Willow, and Long Live (Taylor's version)

[mar]

There is so much in this collection that I find it difficult to rate tbh, but let’s just say I get the Shakespeare hype (for the most part)

[dimmo · Rating 5 out of 5]

shakespeare’s sonnets are lyrical and deeply emotional featuring poems about beautiful love as well as those that express sorrow and contemplation on life’s uncertainties :))

[G.D. Master · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shakespeare’s sonnets, all 154, are a must have for anybody academically or professionally involved with the English language. Shakespeare’s sonnet form is a mechanical staple for poets. With its three rhyming quatrains and couplet ending, the Shakespearian sonnet lends itself well to formal argumentation: claim, premises, inference, and conclusion. Many of the poems argue for a young man to quit squandering his life away and find a woman to love and procreate with. Other sonnets muse on love, women, writing, and immortality. Shakespeare’s use of demarcated English, like “Thee, Thou,” and elision used for words and phrases, can be challenging for students and many recreational readers, but with time readers can appreciate Shakespeare’s genius for fitting all manner of English into his meter. Often Shakespeare is noted for his iconic plays, but for some students it may be less difficult to start with Shakespeare’s sonnets and begin to acquire a primer for his poetic style, which is applied in his plays. Rhyme is important in Shakespeare’s sonnets. While rhyme has fallen out of vogue for most twenty-first century poets, it was coveted to a challenging, even arduous, extent during Shakespeare’s time. Shakespeare’s plays have iambic pentameter meter in common with his sonnets, but do not have their disciplined approach to rhyming. Given either form, sonnets or plays, Shakespeare has poetic mechanics covered, mastered, and unequalled. Shakespeare’s sonnets are as entertaining as they are a challenge to analyze. His sonnet’s are not difficult to read and should not be beyond a secondary student’s understanding. It is simply a matter of recreational readers taking the time to sit down with Shakespeare and read him in small doses until his work can be casually grasped and enjoyed in larger amounts.

[Florence Ridley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Colin Burrow's edition of The Complete Sonnets and Poems is notable for its exhaustiveness. The introduction is well-written, interesting and convincingly summarised contemporary research. The footnotes are clear and helpful and the inclusion of miscellaneous writings attributed to Shakespeare in the eighteenth century was convincingly justified. Burrow's contributions to this edition were genuinely pleasurable to read.

I adore Venus and Adonis and struggle a little more with Lucrece (in this I am aligned with Shakespeare's contemporaries). The strange interlude where Lucrece projects her emotions onto the tapestry of the fall of Troy is fascinating and confusing, at once a brilliant work of fantasy ekphrasis and a major distraction from Lucrece's suffering.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the Sonnets. Read together, the sequence offers something more than the individuals, some of which I had already studied. Having been a little disappointed by Astrophil and Stella , I was delighted to find that Shakespeare excels just as much among sonnet-writers as among playwrights.

The shorter poems were equally enjoyable to read. Frankly, Shakespeare is just quite a good writer and so his poems are pretty good. This edition framed them in the best possible way and featured insightful editorial additions, so I would consider it the best modern edit of Shakespeare I've personally encouuntered.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

What am I rating, Shakespeare or the notes that go with this edition? If I could write one sentence as memorable as 1000 by Shakespeare, I would deserve five star ratings on everything I do forever. But his sonnets have a quiet power that doesn't leap out like, say, the grief in Lear or the discordance of Hamlet. They are so exquisitely formal that they draw the reader from the content to the hints and suggestions and insights (if he follows his inner ear) in ways that only arise to consciousness later on. And they do so like nothing else I've read apart from Spencer and Chaucer in English.

At least I think that is what is going to happen. Now I have to read them.

[Akiva ꙮ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Started the morning off right being late to work because I had to text the group chat about Shakespeare's most bisexual sonnets

tl;dr:

20 - you're so fucking gorgeous and genderfucky and literally everyone wants to bone you, cunt joke, dick joke

19 - if my boyfriend gets older I will face god and walk backward into hell

130 - my girlfriend is a regular human lady with a regular human lady body AND I LOVE HER SO FUCKING MUCH AND I WILL FUCKING FIGHT YOU IF YOU SAY YOUR GIRLFRIEND IS PRETTIER YOU FAKE-ASS LYING BITCH

[Hannah Polley · Rating 3 out of 5]

All of Shakespeare's poems and sonnets in one volume. And even some poems that are attributed to Shakespeare but may not have been written by him.

It does show how remarkable Shakespeare was to be able to write so much poetry.

Probably one to dip in and out of rather than read all at once.

[Laura Clawson · Rating 5 out of 5]

He was onto something.

[Tori · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finished these last year as a bucket list item but realized I hadn’t ever logged it on Goodreads. I had two versions- the original sonnets and poems and a modern version with explanations which helped me understand what was happening.

Not my favorite exercise, but I am glad I made it through.

[Rob Gifford]

this guy’s pretty good. wonder why he never wrote anything else

[Jacob Hurley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shakespeare's first real publication, predating I think even the earliest plays, was Venus and Adonis, which sold so very well on account of its salacious contents ... it was sort of a viral text, beloved among audiences and referenced in popular media, inspiring both ready publication of its sequel Lucrece (published with a note on the first page indicating the place where the actual rape occurs, so that saucy-seeking readers could skip ahead) and a weird volume called 'the Pilgrim's Progress', with a few miscellaneous Shakespeare poems and a number of pastiches by minor poets of Venus. Everyone loves Rococo pornography, don't get me wrong. The work unfolds almost like it's out of the 19th century, beginning with Pre-Raphaelite bowers and concluding with romantic elegies; it is the sort of verse that rides its ABABCC stanzas uncreatively and plays its dead-pan starry-eyed gazing with only the slightest bit of irony, consolatory verse meant to please far more than to instruct, garbled together from a collage of Golding's Ovid, Sidneyanisms, and favorite Elizabethan ornamentations, sing-song and flowery. It's a sort of poetry lost, perhaps, to time, overshadowed by Miltono-Shelleyan declaimations and Donnean cerebralisms, recaptured only dimly by the overcomplex Swinburnes and Rossettis and lost again to the pretentions of modernism. I have always thought a person could become a poet of our age by writing a poem in this tone, but about sex in Brooklyn. At heart everyone who really knows how to read adores this now & again.

The sonnets, some twenty odd years later, are a different sort of 'book', which was published & popularized all the same at the time. 126 sonnets about his love for a beautiful man, 28 about his love for a 'cruel mistress' ... in this uneven dyad, the former takes up a set of fugal sequencing ruminating on nature, time and law, while the latter (disproportionately regarded, perhaps on account of the popularity of heterosexuality) use mostly intense innuendos for sexual contemplations. The mysteries of these poems are often written about, as much for their numerological and shadow-biographical secrets as for their poetic contents ... something about the printing press and its capacity for manuscriptal distribution (producing a few copies of your book and sharing it with the elite readers of your local literary scene rather than public dissemination) produced a market for writing of the cunningest type, as evidenced by its immense popularity for the Jacobean metaphysical poets that came later on; Shakespeare's book was published under obscure circumstances and perhaps against the poet's will, but it seems that these were written privately and probably first circulated in manuscript, perhaps further evidenced by their explicitly intense bisexuality. As opposed to the rougher and more schizophrenically modulatory structuring of Donne and his heirs, Shakespeare perpetually maintains a poetic formalism, never diverging from his specific brand of the sonnet, always keeping in line with the volta, always blocking lines 1-4 and 5-8 in contrasting tones against the final stanza and conclusory couplet, always picking symbolic rhymes, etc, etc ... again, their fever-nightmare, indeterminate tone is something far from lost to any/all poesie since, but rarely do we see stuff such tightly structured, something that falls again to the future to recreate (and something that doesn't need iambic pentameters or sonnet form, of course). This is all to say very little, of course

[Drew M Francis · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is nothing I can add.

[Rachel Brand · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read the first twenty-one sonnets for EN4341: Renaissance Sexualities: Rhetoric and the Body 1580-1660.

Shakespeare always ends up being a bit hit or miss for me. I've really enjoyed some of his plays, like Othello and Anthony and Cleopatra, but just not clicked with others, like King Lear and As You Like It. His sonnets are nice, and maybe I would have enjoyed them more if our tutor hadn't made us scrutinise them for gender references to determine whether Shakespeare was addressing a man or a woman in each of them. Perhaps it's just that the sonnets seem overdone by the time you're finishing an English Lit. degree (much like Burns feels overdone when you live in Scotland and hear the same poems repeated every Burns' Day). Either way, I probably prefer Shakespeare's plays, and I probably would have appreciated his poetry a little more if it weren't for the scrutiny they were forced under in my module this semester. And then there's also the fact that he obviously stole a lot from Erasmus in these first few poems, and I honestly found Erasmus's "In Praise of Marriage" a lot more interesting and compelling than the sonnets convincing a young man to marry. Maybe someday, when I'm not a student, I'll go back and read some more poems and actually end up loving them. We'll see. 3*