SOURCE: "'This Poet Lies': Text and Subtext," in The Reader and Shakespeare 's Young Man Sonnets, Barnes & Noble Books, 1981, pp. 11-29.

In this essay, Hammond explores the sources of readers ' uncertainties about the predominant tone of the sequence and the mood of individual sonnets. Focusing on Sonnets 1-19, he illustrates the discrepancies between text and subtext, the sometimes bewildering array of possible meanings in a single line or quatrain, and the sonnets' immunity to comprehensive generalizations.

I begin by wondering why Shakespeare's sonnets should be so unpopular. Despite their being the only collection of poems by our greatest poet, as a sequence they remain almost as unconsidered and unread as they were in his lifetime.¹ Individual sonnets are known and loved, but as exceptions to the general run of a collection of lifeless poems. Even literary critics have treated them with disdain. In the last forty years...