The Complete Sonnets and Poems
William Shakespeare
Edited by Colin Burrow
Reviews and Awards
"Colin Burrow has produced an excellent edition of the non-dramatic works... This Poems and Sonnets is of high quality, elegent in physical, as well as intellectual, presentation"--New Studies in the Shakespearean Heroine
"[Burrow is] erudite, critically and philosophically sophisticated, and treat[s] textual issues with the seriousness they require.... [Burrow] has been able to offer, in his book-length introduction, the best study there is of Shakespeare as a poet. Burrow writes wonderfully about the interplay between the various poems and genres.... If the bookshelf had room for only one edition of Shakespeare's poems, Burrow's would be the one."--Stephen Orgel, London Review of Books
"Burrow's introduction is perhaps the best single essay on the sonnets available.... Finally, an edition lives or dies by the commentary to individual lines. In his notes, Burrow's insights into the tension between language and circumstance are brilliantly demonstrated in large and small ways (words, images, punctuation, etc.). In short, 'The Complete Sonnets & Poems' completes the work of many editors in making the case for the centrality of the poems to Shakespeare's legacy, and it makes the poems themselves not only approachable and fascinating but often deeply moving. Even in our modern sense of the word, Burrow's Shakespeare is a great poet."--Christian Science Monitor
"The Sonnets have been very well and thoroughly edited in recent years, and a new edition must work rather hard to justify its existence. This edition manages to do so brilliantly."--Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
"Annotated with great knowledge and taste, essential for serious students."--Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance