SOURCE: "The Innocent Insinuations of Wit: The Strategy of Language in Shakespeare's Sonnets," in The Play and Place of Criticism, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967, pp. 19-36.

In this essay, Krieger scrutinizes the internal logic of several sonnets in which the movement from one set of images to another appears spontaneous yet is, in his judgment, the result of a conscious strategy. In these sonnets, he maintains, Shakespeare develops a subtle dialectic which the reader does not perceive until the final lines, when the various images merge into one, inevitable resolution.

If I were to use a single phrase to characterize Shakespeare's strategy at its best, I would term it "the innocent insinuations of wit"—and if "innocent insinuations" suggests an oxymoron, this is precisely to my purpose. The "innocent" is apparent only: on the face of it there is no guile in the words as they marshal themselves...