SOURCE: “Criticism and the Analysis of Craft: The Sonnets,” in Shakespeare's Sonnets, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1987, pp. 29-45.

In the following essay, originally published in 1974, Colie explores Shakespeare's sonnets, and contends that Shakespeare made significant deviations from contemporary sonneteering practices.

By the Sonnets we are also invited to become critics, urged to experience something about the writing of poetry, the making of fictions, and the meanings of poetry to a poet and to any literate man. Where Love's Labour's Lost played with the literary stock conventions and devices, imposed a literary-critical skepticism upon the play's plot, action, and characterization, the Sonnets do something else, dramatize literary criticism. Where Love's Labor's Lost emptied so many conventions of their conventional freight, the Sonnets animate, among other significant and characteristic conventions of the genre, the self-referential, self-critical tendency in sonneteering itself.

Critics of Shakespeare's sonnets consistently remark on...