William Shakespeare’s Poetry

While William Shakespeare is basically well-known as the playwrights, he acquired the fame first as a poet. According to some data, in the early 1590s the bard of Avon began writing a big compilation of sonnets. In 1609 the first edition of these saw the light, it was published by Thomas Thorpe.

 However, Frances Meres, English author of Palladis Tamia, mentions that some of them have been shared with inner-circle of friends as early as 1598. As for the sonnets 138 and 144, they appeared in the 1599 folio The Passionate Pilgrim as early versions without the permission of William Shakespeare.

Thorpe's collection is considered to be the last non-dramatic work printed before Shakespeare’s death. The study of nondramatic poetry allows to trace Shakespeare’s activities as a poet and to see the spirit of his own age, especially in the last twelve years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth as this period is recognized as a great period of literary ferment.

• The Sonnets
• A Lover's Complaint
• The Rape of Lucrece
• Venus and Adonis
• Funeral Elegy by W.S.

William Shakespeare is known for about 154 sonnets. All the sonnets can be broadly divided on three theme groups:

• Sonnets 1-126 are dedicated to the "fair youth" of the sonnets, the deal with a young, unnamed lord;
• Sonnets 127-152 are about the "dark lady", the sonnets deal with the poet's relationship to a mysterious mistress;
• Sonnets 153-154 seem to be nothing more than poetic exercises dedicated to Cupid.

The traditional structure of Shakespearean sonnet implies 14 lines that include three quatrains (four-line stanzas) and two-line stanza or one rhyming couplet. Basically, the poem is written in iambic pentameter (used in traditional English poetry). This type involves 10 syllables in each line with the stress falling on the second syllable of each pair.

Critics and scholars, that have been studying Shakespeare’s work, have praised the sonnets as meditating on the life values like love, lust, procreation, and death. Not by chance, William Shakespeare is ranked as all-time most popular English poets on history, along with such poets as Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost.