Shakespeare?s Sonnets: The Theme Of Love Essay -- essays research pape

Shakespe bes poems are the monument of a remarkable genius but they are also the monuments of a remarkable hop on. The greatness of Shakespeares achievement was largely made possible by the work of his immediate predecessors, Sidney and Spenser.Shakespeares sonnets are intensely personal and are records of his hopes and fears, recognize and friendships, infatuations and disillusions that in turn acquire a universal quality through their intensity.The vogue of the sonnet in the Elizabethan age was brief but was very intense. Sir Thomas Wyatt and The Earl of Surrey brought the Petrarchan sonnet to England and with that an admiration for lyrical poetry. This had major consequences on English verse it was non only due to the smasher of the form of the sonnet but also because the Sonnet had become the vehicle of expression of ones personal feelings. It was with the sonnet that Lyricism entered English Poetry. The Elizabethan sonnets show the mingling of the conventional with the orig inal. There was a greater influence of Italy and France on the English sonnet form but in the hands of the deuce-ace great masters Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare it took a unique form. The sonnets had marks of sincerity that were in direct relation to life and their authors.In the Elizabethan Age there were hammy authors who wrote verse as secondary to their plays and the songs or the lyric were the best in these collections. The songs of this period had the blending of the genius of the people and the artistic sense awakened by humanism. England became the impassioned lover of songs. Most were love-songs, some very free and profane but there were religious songs as well and many were purely fantastic. unless Shakespeares songs were the most original and spontaneous and they were rich in their impression of Nature. They contained a sort of fresh and rustic realism. Like in Winters Tale the image of when daffodils begin to peer and the white sheet is bleaching on the hedge. And al so the purely fantastic songs, which borrow from Nature as in midsummer Nights Dream, banishing the spotted snakes with double tongue. Shakespeares sonnets cannot be classified. They are embedded in a scene and lose their special viewer and subtlety when taken out of context.The majority of Shakespeares poems were written in the early stage of his career. The narrative poems Venus and Adonis... ...t displayed when he says,Against my love shall be as I am now,With Times injurious hand crushd and oerworn (LXIII)Shakespeares sonnets are concerned with the relationship of individual bring (personal ties of love and friendship) with Time. The poems express a conviction of the permanence and validity of emotion in all its different forms, as sonnet 116 doesLoves not Times fool, though rosy lips and cheeksWithin his bending sickles compass comeShakespeare felt that under the pressure of mutability love becomes lust it changes form being an intense human experience to an expenditure of spirit. As love and friendship are born in prison term they are subjected to impermanence and so he believed that what is rooted in time, time itself destroys. And so in sonnet XCIV he saysLilies that fester smell utmost worse than weeds.The Sonnets of Shakespeare hold a dominant place among the development of the Sonnet sequence in the Elizabethan period. His poems show how the sonnet form in its strict formal limits imposes upon the language a distinctive economy and intensity. The sonnets might be based on historical events but they have a oecumenic significance.