What are the common concepts, feelings, or themes in poems written by shakespeare?

Question

I have to write a thesis statement for a british poet. I am thinking about choosing shakespeare. What are the common concepts, feelings, or themes in poems written by shakespeare? Also, what are the repeated themes, symbols, imagery, and concepts throughout his poems?

I enjoy reading poetry but it is difficult for me to comprehend, so if any of you can help me i would greatly apprechiate it, also if you could tell me the poems of shakespeare that you used.

Answer 1

I assume you're going to be writing about the sonnets, since almost all of the rest of Shakespeare's work is drama.

"At the opening of the cycle, the poems bear witness to the virtue that the "fair youth" could exert through his influence over so many hearts, lives and careers. This is the opening into the poet's love. Physically superb, radiantly youthful, politically ascendant, socially powerful, the fair youth represents nearly everything that Shakespeare's culture valued in external life accomplishments and courtly character. To highlight this idealization (and allude to a patronage relationship), the fair youth's perceived virtues are explicitly contrasted with the poet's "too sullied" and demeaning real world existence.

This idealization treats lightly the youth's fundamental flaw, his selfishness in refusing to wed and procreate. But this initial idealization makes horrific the poet's gradual recognition and then public denunciation of the youth's vicious, shallow and selfish character. The poet's ideals become a pathetic illusion, and the poems describe a pervasive spiritual strangulation that goes far beyond amorous disappointment. It is this existential exhaustion that the poet struggles to overcome.

The sensual betrayal of the "dark lady" counterpoints the spiritual betrayal by the young man. With the woman (whose historical identity is unknown) the poet's "betrayal" is inward and visceral, as his lust turns into an addict's remorse. As in King Lear, Shakespeare sometimes makes the point with distastefully literal dirt: but for Shakespeare literal is lower. Lust is a kind of humiliation that his already tormented spiritual existence would gratefully go without. The poet is not only betrayed by the youth's vicious character: he is betrayed by his own. Most important, the "dark lady" characterizes a merely sexual desire, to make clear the difference between lust and the profound longing that reached out to the "fair youth."

The figure of lust, of desire that turns to revulsion, is only one of many conflicts in the poet's existence: he also confronts the struggle between beauty and "devouring time," youth and age, the heart and the eye, truth and passion, torment and steadfastness, duty and fatigue. As in Shakespeare's greatest plays, the core themes are amplified through parallel subplots and images.

Although apparently confessional, even the most agitated poems show literary skill and control. The episodic patterns of narrative repetition and reversal create a vague sense that the poet is recording his life in the moment, as events change. There is an undercurrent of time's change rather than a clear narrative line; an exploration of spiritual facts rather than a sequence of human events. As a whole the cycle assembles its themes in a majestic cumulative vision.

Amid his suffering, the poet's dignity emerges in his high minded endurance, in the strength of his love, his forgiveness, his dry humor, and his powerful verse. The "fair youth" sonnets conclude with an awed realization of the power of genuine love to triumph over any suffering. Love is precious not because the youth is worthy or because the erotic impulse is sweet to fulfill, but because love alone can overcome life's unrelenting waste and futility:

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.


Whatever is the source of the strength the poet finds, it is this immortal truth and beauty that the sonnets magnificently celebrate."


"The Sonnets comprise a collection of 154 poems in sonnet form written by William Shakespeare that deal with such themes as love, beauty, politics, and mortality. The poems were probably written over a period of several years.
Shakespeare's sonnets are frequently more earthy and sexual than contemporary sonnet sequences by other poets. One interpretation is that Shakespeare's Sonnets are in part a pastiche or parody of the three centuries-long tradition of Petrarchan love sonnets; in them, Shakespeare consciously inverts conventional gender roles as delineated in Petrarchan sonnets to create a more complex and potentially troubling depiction of human love.[6] Shakespeare also violated many sonnet rules which had been strictly obeyed by his fellow poets: he speaks on human evils that do not have to do with love (66), he comments on political events (124), he makes fun of love (128), he parodies beauty (130), he plays with gender roles (20), he speaks openly about sex (129) and even introduces witty pornography (151)."


In many ways, Shakespeare's use of the sonnet form is richer and more complex than this relatively simple division into parts might imply. Not only is his sequence largely occupied with subverting the traditional themes of love sonnets--the traditional love poems in praise of beauty and worth, for instance, are written to a man, while the love poems to a woman are almost all as bitter and negative as Sonnet 147--he also combines formal patterns with daring and innovation. Many of his sonnets in the sequence, for instance, impose the thematic pattern of a Petrarchan sonnet onto the formal pattern of a Shakespearean sonnet, so that while there are still three quatrains and a couplet, the first two quatrains might ask a single question, which the third quatrain and the couplet will answer. As you read through Shakespeare's sequence, think about the ways Shakespeare's themes are affected by and tailored to the sonnet form. Be especially alert to complexities such as the juxtaposition of Petrarchan and Shakespearean patterns. How might such a juxtaposition combination deepen and enrich Shakespeare's use of a traditional form?"

PLEASE SEE LINK 4 - the last link - FOR MORE MAJOR THEMES. Here's a sample:

"The Ravages of Time:
Shakespeare’s sonnets open with an earnest plea from the narrator to the fair lord, begging him to find a woman to bear his child so that his beauty might be preserved for posterity. In sonnet 2, the poet writes, “When forty winters shall beseige thy brow / And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field … How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use / If thou couldst answer ‘This fair child of mine / Shall sum my count and make my old excuse’ / Proving his beauty by succession thine!” The poet is lamenting the ravages of time and its detrimental effects on the fair lord’s beauty, seeking to combat the inevitable by pushing the fair lord to bequeath his exquisiteness unto a child. By sonnet 18 the poet appears to have abandoned this solution in favor of another: his verse. “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see / So long lives this and this gives life to thee.” But the ravages of time return to haunt the narrator: in sonnet 90, the poet characterizes time as a dimension of suffering, urging the fair lord to break with him “if ever, now”; “Give not a windy night a rainy morrow,” he writes, pleading with him to end the desperation of hopeful unrequited love. The theme resurfaces throughout the sonnets in the narrator’s various descriptions of himself as an aging man: “But when my glass shows me myself indeed / Beated and chopp’d with tann’d antiquity” (sonnet 62); “And wherefore say not I that I am old?” (sonnet 138). It has also been suggested that the poet implies that he is balding in sonnet 73, where he writes, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang / Upon those boughs …”; such an interpretation fits well with the idea that Shakespeare is in fact the narrator of the sonnets, as extant portraits of Shakespeare show the poet to have been balding in his later years."

Answer 2

Shakespeare's poetry whoever wrote it was written at the end of the Late medieval period, when Renaissance ideas of worldly life, individual liberty and a marketplace of responsibilities and choices were not wholly accepted. bright as the Poet who wrote the Shakespearean portions of the work had to be, he wa more Late medieval than renaissance in his thinking. His favorite themes are the injustice that people get for loyal service, the pain of unhappy love, the disappointment of not getting what one has deserved, the brevity of time, the beauty that cannot last long, the importance of god friends, honesty and caution, and he danger of an imbalance or one-sidedness to character and purposes. He is a closet Medieval protestant religionist who talks about luck, divine justice and missed opportunities in the same breath. His favorite poetic device is the "pathetic fallacy"; here he personifies as living actors inanimate things and emotions--revenge, stones, storms, the sun, drugs, etc. nd he characteristically uses three-step development scheme in a poem or speech: 1. Deny the usual idea about something. 2. Replace it with a clearer or better idea. 3. Then develop the consequences of that change. He uses this over and over. The sonnets occupy by far the largest part of the Poet's works. They're the chief source, along with Venus and Adonis, a reworked early satire of Queen Elizabeth's amorous advances to young courtiers, The Rape of Lucrece--a practice poem for writing Titus Andronicus and other ancient history plays, and the shorter poems.The sonnets, some rewritten from other men's work but the vast majority by the Poet or rewritten by him, is far the most important source.

Answer 3

Shakespeare's sonnets read like a kind of journal of his emotional life. The early ones tend to be about how immortality is only possible through our children:

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl, mak'st waste in niggarding:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.

, later turning to poems written to an unnamed lover...


Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.


and so on.

Go to the web site I've cited below, but don't read the commentaries. Read the sonnets. The commentaries are the usual academic nonsense. Read the sonnets as if you were reading the secret journal of someone you know.
Once you get past the language, it's pretty obvious.

Answer 4

All of his poems or just the sonnets? You have to know which ones you are going to talk about. Your question is too vague at this point. If you need a good site on the sonnets, try this one:

http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/

Answer 5

mostly various forms of love and its qualities.
Develop this and tell about how he expressed love, he was fine with the theme of love.Be it his tragedies or his comedies, there is always something about love