{"id":58,"date":"2017-01-31T21:20:03","date_gmt":"2017-02-01T02:20:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/?p=58"},"modified":"2017-01-31T21:20:03","modified_gmt":"2017-02-01T02:20:03","slug":"shakespeare-was-a-real-boss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/romancing-the-sonnet\/shakespeare-was-a-real-boss\/","title":{"rendered":"Shakespeare Was a Real Boss"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Reading Vendler&#8217;s article and then reading Shakespeare&#8217;s sonnets, I was struck by exactly how talented Shakespeare was as a sonnet poet. Now, yes this is blindingly obvious, but it comes with further justification. I had never fully appreciated that, as Vendler notes, &#8220;Shakespeare comes late in the sonnet tradition, and he is challenged by that very fact to a display of virtuosity, since he is competing against great predecessors&#8221; (Vendler 27). That Shakespeare came late in the sonnet tradition is something that I, if I am being honest, never knew. Because, growing up and reading\u00a0<em>Sonnets<\/em> in English classes, you assume that the guy basically invented the form. That he was able to take the sonnet and have such an influence that, 400 years later, we are talking about him as the master, is really impressive. Impressive beyond the impressive nature of his poetry, and impressive beyond his list of achievements. It&#8217;s impressive because he, before he had first put pen to paper, had to mentally grapple with the fact that he was writing in a form that was 1) on its way out, and 2) already saturated with brilliant poets. I guess what I am saying in this post is that, putting his literary mastery aside, Shakespeare&#8217;s mentality is also something to be truly marveled at.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Reading Vendler&#8217;s article and then reading Shakespeare&#8217;s sonnets, I was struck by exactly how talented Shakespeare was as a sonnet poet. Now, yes this is blindingly obvious, but it comes with further justification. I had never fully appreciated that, as Vendler notes, &#8220;Shakespeare comes late in the sonnet tradition, and he is challenged by that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":406,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-romancing-the-sonnet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/406"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-2202-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}