Shakespeare’s “My Mistress’ Eyes…” sonnet is one of his most well know and beloved sonnets. Not only is this because Shakespeare is, in the words of one of my former professors “a god-like genius”, but also because Sonnet 130 is, at its heart, a good poem. I believe this is what Ted Kooser was trying to convey in Chapter Four (‘Don’t Worry about the Rules’) of The Poetry Home Repair Manual.
Kooser makes the case that poetry should be first and foremost about substance (i.e. the point/plot/meaning) with style growing out of that substance. He gives the example of the haiku, traditionally 17 syllables, and yet that restriction does not always have to be enforced, if the resulting balance is a much stronger and more meaningful poem. He even goes so far to state that he believes along with the critic John Berger that: “Every successful sonnet is a good poem first and a good sonnet second” (Kooser 28). And this is what makes Shakespeare’s poems so enduring: people react to them first on an emotional/intuitive level before they look into the effort Shakespeare must have put in to craft the sonnet form.
Yea i agree... you don't really appreciate his style unitl you actually understand the rigid structure of it, and then it becomes extrememly impressive. The only problem I have with this style though is that it is more like a construction than a paintin; he made the words fit into a mold instead of just letting them flow, but admittedly he did it exceptionally well.
ReplyDeleteJulia, what do you think is so great about this sonnet?
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