SOURCE: "Shakespeare's Sonnets: Age in Love and the Goring of Thoughts," in Studies in Philology, Vol. 80, No. 3, Summer, 1983, pp. 300-24.

In the following essay, Klause closely examines the apparent inconsistencies in the poetic voice of the sonnets. While acknowledging that the aging "Poet" of the sonnets sounds "humble" and "submissive." Klause asserts that this tone is intentionally used by the poet as a persuasive device and that it is not in conflict with the sonnets' powerful imagery.

To call the man whose travail is recorded in Shakespeare's Sonnets a protagonist may seem to grant him a status beyond his desert. Of a protagonist we expect at least that he struggle for or against something and that in his exertions, even when he is inconsistent, he prove himself a coherent personality. Shakespeare's Poet, it has been suggested, does neither.

Yvor Winters once complained of a "servile weakness" in...