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Article: The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets.(Review)
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- September 22, 1998
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CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Northern Illinois University. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Helen Vendler. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. xx + 672 pp. $35.00 doth. CD included: the author reads 65 sonnets.
As a stylized form of verbal construction and expression, the sonnet necessarily demands conscious artistic manipulation of words and their patterns of sound and meaning. Yet undeniably there are varying levels of achievement in the history of this long-popular form, and some writers have even found the sonnet devoid of meaning simply because it is redundant. In Helen Vendler's close reading of the 154Shakespeare sonnets, however, this magisterial critic reveals that in fact the Bard's consummate, unmatched art - his "impulse to aesthetic stylization" ...