The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets.

Helen Vendler. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997. x + 672 pp, with a compact disk of selected sonnets read by the author. $35. ISBN: 0-67463711-9.

Helen Vendler's commentary on Shakespeare's sonnets follows several important studies of individual poets by this noted scholar, including ones on Keats, Wallace Stevens, and, in the Renaissance period, George Herbert. Vendler is known as a brilliant and helpful practitioner of close reading, a critical approach still particularly appropriate to lyric poetry. Thus she is attentive to verbal patterns and rhetorical strategies, and mainly unconcerned with Shakespeare's biography or psychology, or with issues of gender that have always intrigued critics of these poems, the majority of which seem to be addressed to a male hearer.

While Professor Vendler obviously relishes the intricate verbal artistry of these sonnets, she considers clarity and rationality major virtues for a critic, and her lucidity should be welcome to a wide range of readers, whatever the extent of their literary training. For some poems she supplies diagrams as well as verbal descriptions of important themes and their rhetorical arrangements. The three quatrains of the Shakespearean sonnet are labeled by her (Q1, Q2, Q3), with repeated "key words" listed at the end of each poem, as well as verbal links to the final couplets, which she calls "couplet ties." Given this potentially mechanical method, the subtlety and diversity of her readings are impressive. She describes in her introduction a variety of possible relations among the three quatrains: in some cases, the final quatrain answers a question posed by the first two; in others, an analytical perspective is later supplied for earlier imagery; in yet others, we get "retreating panels of time" (19), to name only a few of the patterns she discerns. The degrees of"permeability" or separation between quatrains vary greatly also. But while she points out in her introduction that the final rhymed couplet is an occasional pitfall even for a poet of Shakespeare's powers because of its detachability and tendency to anticlimactic summary, her emphasis in the commentaries on verbal repetitions in the couplets does not generally address the notorious question of their success as resolutions.

Vendler's common sense approach is particularly evident in her analyses of figurative language. As in her book on Herbert, she sometimes posits a "normal" language from which metaphoric passages deviate, at times going so far as to rewrite parts of poems in standard everyday English of her own in order to accentuate their poetic heightenings, or to introduce sequential temporal sequences that have, according to such readings, been transposed poetically. Together with her lists and diagrams - showing, for example, parallels or contrasts between the social and natural world, between lightness and darkness, between distance and proximity, and the like - her commentaries suggest the poems' fundamentally rational core. For this reason perhaps, their wonderful word-music - admittedly one of their most elusive features - is not a major source of interest. With very few exceptions (including the inferior no. 126), she does little with meter, let alone rhythm. While she clearly has her favorites, furthermore (no. 73, for example, "That time of year. . . . "which so beautifully exploits the three-quatrain form), she deals with each in roughly the same amount of space, two to four pages. Her spatial impartiality mutes a sense of aesthetic judgment about poems which many readers have found somewhat uneven in quality and complexity (even though few have quantified their preferences as W.H. Auden did when he called 49 of the 154 poems "truly excellent"). And though each of her commentaries is accompanied by the appropriate sonnet printed both in a facsimile of the first 1609 Quarto and in a modern version, she rarely comments on differences between the two, even when these are quite striking (the change from the Quarto's "sel my name" to the modern "tell my name" in no. 76 is an example).

But despite such complaints, this remains a very valuable book, which all students of the sonnets, as well as general readers, will consult. Vendler simply notices more than most of the rest of us do when she reads these poems. Her perceptiveness about visual as well as auditory puns and anagrams, for example sometimes involving French and Latin as well as English - is remarkable; it is also in keeping with poetic practice in a period where such ingenuity was much prized. More fundamentally, when she describes the "leakages" between metaphoric and analytic language, and between specialized vocabularies (legal, astronomical, medical, botanical, and so many others), which become fused by Shakespeare in a kind of poetic "ur-language," she uses her talent for rational distinctions to help us appreciate his achievement in the sonnets.

Rutgers University