SOURCE: “Shakespeare at Sonnets,” in Singing Masters: Poets in English 1500 to the Present, University of Michigan Press, 1999, pp. 3-19.

In the following essay, Fraser analyzes Shakespeare's departures from standard sonnet form and argues that such deviations were intentional and serve to enhance the quality of the poetry.

I take my title from an essay of John Crowe Ransom's, collected in The World's Body (1938). “Shakespeare at Sonnets,” Ransom decided, wasn't up to the job, “not fit for amateurs.” This distinguished critic shied at “incoherence” and thought poetry should make as consistent sense as prose. Some poets, he said (in an essay on Millay, warming up for Shakespeare), adopted combinations of words that didn't quite fit into perfect meanings. That was fudging but seemed to them agreeable, the combination offering “the uncertain possibility of two meanings rather than the certainty of one.” A poem was even better when you doubted...