Sonnets

About this book

Shakespeare's Sonnets gathers 154 luminous lyric meditations in which one of English literature's greatest poets plumbs desire, fidelity, time, and the ache of human longing with striking clarity and verbal daring. Built on the tight architecture of the sonnet form—each poem a fourteen-line crucible of image, rhythm, and rhetorical turn—these brief but intense pieces range from whispered confessions and ardent praises to mordant ironies and bruising reckonings, mapping the pleasures and injuries of love, jealousy, beauty and mortality. For new readers and longtime admirers alike, the sequence offers continually surprising turns of phrase and emotional insight that reward close, repeated reading.