Shakespeare and Helen Vendler

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Shakespeare and Helen Vendler

In The Art of Shakespeare 's Sonnets , Helen Vendler takes for granted a "homosexual infatuation consummated in the eye 's intercourse with an image " in the boy sonnets and "heterosexual infatuation completed in the penis ' intercourse within the bay where all men ride " in the dark-lady poems and specified that the two "are so characteristically present together in Shakespeare 's speaker , it seems at first extraordinary that they should have been euphemized by so many observers into traditional

br friendship and conventional (if adulterous ) heterosexual practice " But unlike Duncan-Jones , Vendler does not attribute this euphemizing to personal nervousness on the part of previous critics or to a desire to exonerate Shakespeare . In its place "the reason these passions were susceptible to such euphemizing is that the feelings to fetishistic or anomalous sexual attraction are equal to the feelings to more conventional sexual practice , and it is essential feelings , not love-objects , which are traced in lyric " Thus it does not matter a great deal to whom "Shall I compare thee to a summer 's day was addressed "The poet 's duty is to create aesthetically convincing representations of feelings felt and thoughts thought . Whether or not we believe that such should have been the speaker 's feelings and thoughts is entirely irrelevant to the aesthetic success of the poem Certainly "meaning " is irrelevant "the wish of interpreters of poems to arrive at something they call 'meaning ' seems to...