Sonnets

Sonnet 20 is the sequence's most formally daring poem — and the one that addresses, with more directness than anywhere else, exactly what kind of love this is.

Sonnet 94 is the most ambiguous poem in the sequence — and whether it is praise or indictment depends on a reading that Shakespeare deliberately refuses to provide.

Sonnet 65 is the most frightened of all Shakespeare's poems about time — and its claim for poetry is the most qualified he ever made.

Sonnet 60 is the most formally disciplined of all Shakespeare's meditations on time — and the most honest about the limits of what poetry can do against it.

Sonnet 138 is one of the funniest poems in the sequence — and one of the most uncomfortable, because the joke is at everyone's expense, including the reader's.

Sonnet 55 is Shakespeare's most aggressive poem — a direct challenge to the powerful, delivered in fourteen lines.

Sonnet 18 opens with what sounds like a compliment and turns out to be an argument — one of the most quietly radical arguments in the English language.

Sonnet 29 is not a poem about love defeating despair. It is a poem about love making despair irrelevant — which is a different and more honest claim.

Sonnet 130 is not a poem about an ordinary woman. It is a poem about what lying on behalf of a woman does to love.

Sonnet 116 is not a love poem. It is a definition — and definitions, especially ones this carefully argued, are usually made under pressure.