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Shakespeare's Sonnets & Poems (Folger Shakespeare Library)

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William Shakespeare is best known as a playwright. When you think of Shakespeare, you automatically think of plays -- "Romeo and Juliet," "Macbeth," "Hamlet," etc.

But he was also a poet of considerable skill. And while he sprinkled his various plays with poetry and songs, his poems are best appreciated when they're read all by themselves -- particularly "Shakespeare's Sonnets & Poems," which include the soul-baring sonnets as well as his excellent narrative poems

Each sonnet has no title, and is simply identified by numbers. And while Shakespeare's love poems are the best known of these works, he addresses different themes in theme -- old age, writer's block loneliness, the cruelty of the world, sex, beauty, a mysterious rival poet, and Shakespeare's own complicated romantic feelings (love that "looks upon tempests and is not shaken").

And these poems are absolutely lovely. Some of these sonnets are pretty well-known ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?/Thou art more lovely and more temperate") but most of them are a little more obscure. They have vivid metaphors and imagery ("let not winter's ragged hand deface," "gold candles fix'd in heaven's air") and hauntingly lovely passages ("What is your substance, whereof are you made,/That millions of strange shadows on you tend?").

And these sonnets really give you new insights into Shakespeare as a person -- he feels uncertainty, passionate love, unhappiness, lust and quirky humor. But while it's obvious these sonnets were deeply personal, they can still be appreciated on their own, particularly as love poetry.

But then we have the narrative poems: "Venus and Adonis," a sexually charged, semi-erotic poem of the goddess Venus' love affair with a young hunter, which ends in tragedy. "The Rape of Lucrece" is an even bleaker tragedy, in which a Roman woman's rape and suicide have far-reaching political effects. And there's the brief "The Phoenix and the Turtle," an oblique little poem about a phoenix and a turtledove.

These poems are quite different from the sonnets, in that none of them are about Shakespeare -- they're all telling stories, most of which he didn't even come up with. And you can tell that Shakespeare was one playwright/poet who also would have made a brilliant novelist, because his writing is powerful, muscular and soaked with metaphor (the rape of Lucrece is compared to military conquest... it's cooler than it sounds).

William Shakespeare's "Sonnets and Poems" are rich with meaning, language and atmosphere -- the Elizabethan English takes a little deciphering, but it's well worth it.

I have not read all the book yet, but, I have read quite a few sonnets and Shakespeares epic 'venus and Adonis' love them and would recomend this book to any Shakespeare lover or lover of poetry.