[In the following excerpt, Addison offers praise for The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, but notes potentially problematic aspects of Vendler's “authorial presence” in her explication.]

Helen Vendler’s The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets is a tour de force. Comprising nearly seven hundred pages, it represents nine years’ work and includes a detailed analysis of every one of the 154 poems in the sequence. Each sonnet is reproduced both as a reprint of the 1609 Quarto edition and in Vendler’s own slightly modernized edition. The book is accompanied by a recording on CD of Vendler herself reading a selection of the sonnets—a reading about which she is uncharacteristically self-deprecatory, believing that “for both textual and acoustic reasons the ideal reading … would be done by a male voice.” Precise and fluent as her reading is, it is detached and undramatic almost to a fault.

This book’s raison d’être is to defend the Sonnets against certain recent “jaundice[d]” commentaries and to correct what Vendler sees as a tendency to take too social and psychological an approach to them （1–3）. Vendler accepts, without much discussion, the received order of the Sonnets, believing that it may be an authorial arrangement. She also accepts the “story” of the Sonnets as conventionally perceived—the Young Man and the Dark Lady sequences, with their fatal overlap—but she believes that “lyric is both more and less than story” （3）. She speculates not at all about any “actual identities” of these protagonists: they remain for her fictional constructs, as does the speaker.

Vendler is a master-mistress of the art of close reading. Her attention to detail is minute, but what really impresses her reader is the way in which she relates each detail to its larger contexts—the poem as a whole; the stylistic, narrative and thematic sequences of which it forms a part; all of the Sonnets; the complete body of Shakespeare’s work; and so on. As she explains in her introduction, she learned all of the sonnets by heart before undertaking this work, and her extraordinary cognizance of verbal echoes of every type reflects the benefits of this out-of-fashion practice. Perhaps the most astonishing of her structural “discoveries” （or inventions） is the “Couplet Tie,” which is what she calls a word appearing in a closing couplet which is a repetition or variant of a word contained in the body of a sonnet. In almost every sonnet, Vendler finds a Couplet Tie—sometimes several. She also points out what she calls the “Key Word,” which is a word that appears in some variant in each quatrain and the couplet of many of the sonnets. Where the Key Word is defective, appearing in only two out of the three quatrains, its absence from the third plays games with reader expectations as noticeably as the presence of repetitions and variations. As a long-time reader of the Sonnets, I am amazed to discover such sweeping new generalizations about them which are so soundly demonstrable. Vendler, throughout this book, speaks with the tone of authority—perhaps most when her judgments are offered most tentatively—and I for one find myself assuming the posture of willing disciple to her authority.

Of course, this posture will not do, particularly for a reviewer. Acknowledging that authority is more a matter of rhetoric than of fact, I should take up a more seemly and democratic position from which to investigate Vendler’s strategies of power. After all, she is “merely” a reader, like the rest of us. But this fact, however self-evident and freely admitted by Vendler, is what she so devilishly conceals so much of the time. Often the trick is in the choice of subjects for her active verbs. These are frequently nouns referring to the poems—or to parts of them—rather than to any perceiving consciousness. Sonnets, quatrains, couplets, phrases, words “offer” or “present” certain effects—the verbs usually not followed by any indirect object, “to us” or “to a reader,” which might bring in the fallible human agent. She also uses “Shakespeare” as an active subject quite often, thereby claiming an intimate knowledge of his motives and stylistic habits. One may argue that she, of all people, is entitled to make such a claim; but her reader is not always conscious of the making of a claim at all, since she mostly avoids reminders of authorial presence in these sentences, suggesting, as an “omniscient” narrator of a novel might, that she has godlike access to the mind of the Other. Similarly, “the speaker,” distinguished from the author in the orthodox way, is very often the protagonist in her narrative sentences, which usually include no explicit reference to the process by which—or the person by whom—the “presence” of this speaker is deduced.

In fact, many of these devices occur for the best of stylistic reasons: the spare sentences of objectivity are more elegant than sentences that struggle to include at every turn the convolutions of self-reflexivity. Vendler does state her position at the outset. Defying traditional beliefs about lyric, she asserts that the “words of a poem are not ‘overheard,’” but that the “act of the lyric is to offer its reader a script to say” （18）. In the process of “repeated personal recitation,” the reader fictionalizes her- or himself as the speaker of the poem, presumably eliding the necessity for specific discussion of a reader-in-the-process-of-reading. This makes her view of reception resemble that of Georges Poulet, to whom the reader is so self-effacing as to become almost mystically bonded with the voice that speaks in the text. The reader exists as the sine qua non of the reading experience, but under erasure as it were, subsumed into the persona generating, not receiving, the words.

This is not to claim that Vendler actually eschews mention of a reader or reading consciousness. It is simply a matter of emphasis. Particularly in discussing matters of uncertainty or ambiguity, she does invoke a reading subject—or subjects, rather, since her favored pronoun in this context is the first-person plural. But she uses not only the royal “we” of the professor emeritus condescending among the undergraduates; the impersonal “one” appears occasionally and also, always at moments of special interest for me, the first-person singular. She is an author absolutely in control of her tone and of her relationship to her reader and subject-matter. A virtuoso, she creates the illusion of objective authority only where it seems appropriate for reasons of elegance and succinctness, but she also breaks this illusion where necessary and steps into the lime-light as a creative and perceptive consciousness.