reccomend a soliloquy from shakespeare to me

yeah that one is kind of a bullseye alright :)

yeah, I think most of the dozen or so top anthology pieces have their place for a reason - they work taken out of the sequence, they're incredibly rhetorically involving, are sonically astonishing & have depth without being baffling. 129 used to be my favourite of them, but I think that ranking is still tied tied up with adolescent self-loathing. Let me get some numbers for other favourites… 53, 60, 87, 146.

It's just an astonishing collection of poems though, just so resiliently strange; and not 16th-century strange, its own whole world of strange.

I've prob said this somewhere else, but Don Paterson's book on them is the best work of poetry criticism I've read in an age – has done 'the reading' but then is just bouncing around between thinking about love, & rhetoric and reading them as a (fine) working poet himself, and getting sucked into sequence-narratives while trying to resist them. Really masterful combo of close reading & worldliness. If you only read one book on the sonnets, etc…

On the Garbage thread we lauded precision. I can think of few sonnets as perfectly engineered as the sonnets.

idk, I think there's a lot of shonky work in there. I mean (just to take the trad criticism) he blows the couplet with such regularity! Slips into cheese or platitude or a tortuous rhyme. I am cheering for him when he actually pulls off a final one-two. But I think the up-and-down-ness is the delight of it - he's in this intense psychological world that basically no-one else is worrying at round then, and is finding forms & a language for it, & sometimes getting lost, & sometimes hitting the basic renaissance toolkit, & sometimes just doing the numbers - but there isn't an achievement like it, both read at length & for those poems where he absolutely nails it.

that sonnets site is my dad's btw. #1 google result! design by yrs truly! (including shoddy overflowing text and adverts)

Cool! It's a really great site - I hadn't really looked on the web before, so had never seen it - so much stuff (& nice design – clean, I can find things!) Barnes is there! I've never read Barnes, that's my morning sorted.

Ian McKellen talking about this Macbeth soliloquy is like - I'm maybe in it 25% for his insights, and 75% for the man

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGbZCgHQ9m8