Shakespeare Journal

9/14 Sonnets (1.

I usually have to force myself to read poetry, especially sonnets about romance that seem contrived or sentimentalized. Also, I am not very good at understanding and explaining the various metaphors, hidden meanings and so on. Sonnet 18 is so famous that it has long since turned into a cliche ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?") and would simply not go over very well is a more cynical, less romantic age. I know that I have never met anyone who made me feel like they were a summer day, not in this world. Reading and rereading all of them, however, I began to wonder if Shakespeare was even writing these about a woman. Some of them I had never read before, such as Sonnet 20 which is far riskier since the writer states openly that he loves a young man who is a...
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