Sonnets
154 sonnets that constitute the most sustained meditation on love, time, jealousy, and mortality in the English language. The Fair Youth sequence, the Dark Lady poems, and the Rival Poet (whoever they were) have generated more literary scholarship than almost any other body of work. Sonnet 18 and Sonnet 130 are taught in every high school; the complete sequence remains inexhaustible.
Large stretches of the sequence are hard to parse without help: one reader admits “I couldn't understand half of it.” Reading all 154 straight through brings diminishing returns rather than accumulating power, one reviewer ending up liking “only six that I liked enough to eventually re-read.” Readers who prefer the plays miss the “more tomfoolery, more wordplay” they find there, and next to that energy the sonnets read as static and heavier going. Abridged “greatest hits” editions marketed around romance draw their own complaints too: one reader points out the selection is “not all his love sonnets,” trimmed from 154 down to a fraction and smoothing over the sequence's darker, non-romantic poems to fit a rose-tinted package.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
