Short Poems

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William Shakespeare is the author of “Sonnet 130.” The sonnet is one of 154 sonnets that Shakespeare published in 1609 under the title Shakes-spears Sonnets. The first 126 sonnets address a young man, while Sonnets 127-152 focus on a mysterious woman. As with “Sonnet 130,” the sonnets about the enigmatic woman concern ideas of love and beauty and directly undercut typical representations of both. Thus, “Sonnet 130” is satire; it makes fun of how adored... Read Sonnet 130 Summary

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William Shakespeare is the best-known author of the English Renaissance—also known as the Early Modern Period and the Elizabethan Age. Though readers’ attention tends to be more riveted toward his plays, Shakespeare published 154 sonnets during his exceptionally prolific career, in addition to the longer-form poems Venus and Adonis (1593), The Rape of Lucrece (1594), and The Phoenix and the Turtle (1601). Fifteen editions of Venus and Adonis—a poem in the form of 199 six-line... Read Sonnet 18 Summary

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“Sonnet 55” (1609) is an English love sonnet by renowned poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616). The sonnet is part of Shakespeare’s Fair Youth sonnet sequence, which makes up the first 126 of his sonnets. This sonnet follows a number of the Fair Youth sonnets in the way it praises the fair youth’s beauty and claims his beauty is eternal. In this sonnet specifically, Shakespeare claims that the subject’s beauty will outlive all monuments of princes and... Read Sonnet 55 Summary

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... Read Sorrow Is Not My Name Summary

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Matthew Arnold’s “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” takes its name from a seventeenth-century monastery in Grenoble in the French Alps, famous as the headquarters of the Carthusian order of Catholic monks. Arnold wrote this philosophical poem after visiting the monastery in the early 1850s. Comprised of thirty-five stanzas, each of which contains six lines of iambic tetrameter verse set to an “ABABCC” rhyme scheme, the poem is one of the better-known examples of Arnold’s early poetry... Read Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse Summary

Maya Angelou was an American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist whose career spanned over 50 years. She published seven autobiographies, several books of poetry, and three essay collections and wrote plays, movies, and television shows. Her widely acclaimed work has received numerous awards, and Angelou has received over 50 honorary degrees. Her best known work is her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sing, which focuses on her childhood up to the... Read Still I Rise Summary