"my favourite Poet and the greatest of all times"
I'd refrain from that saying. Kindly excuse my harshness, but William Shakespeare was a poet who - though amazing - could hardly be called the greatest of all. Let's talk just about English for a moment, Shakespeare was a complex person who wrote complex arguments, which is hardly what can be said constitutes perfect poetry.
In recent times I decided I'd focus on learning free-verse, a task that will probably forever be too difficult for me to master. Poetic licence is far easier to utilise in metrical writings. I started by writing tiny verses of very simple arguments that have deep philosophy. Something like:
Sometimes I wish
You had never opened your eyes -
Your lashes are all I ever wanted.
This is a clear example of a simple message, compromise for the beauty you have rather than risk going further. The moment the lashes open, you will see the eyes, and those eyes might not be as beautiful as the lashes that you see no more. The argument is simple, and the argument is beautiful (whether or not the poetry is), but it needn't be complex.
Shakespeare was a complex fellow. A great tool to use in his plays, it doesn't necessarily make his poetry better; but people find his writings charming. I bet you that if those sonnets were published 50 years ago instead of at the time, and if it were not the most lauded entertainer in England who published them, they would never contain the most quoted line in poetry, they would not be printed as much as back then, and they would not have stories written about them (such as Oscar Wilde's "The Portrait of Mr. W.H."). The sonnets contain that type of subtlely of manipulating language (135) that is very typical of Shakespeare's entertaining approach to the Elizabethan crowds in his populist plays.
Language can be manipulated, and Shakespeare is one of the masters who did that in English. English, however, is just not well-suited enough to be funny when manipulated... I tell you this as a Hebrew poet, and as a person who can more-or-less understand Aramaic in its most complex syntax-forms after 30 minutes of wall-basing (I study Talmud, which basically means I study 1,500 year-old religious law through obscure stories in very colloquial dialects of a foreign language): English is not very well-suited for all these word-plays as Hebrew and Aramaic (and Arabic) are, and proof is that the art of tweaking has been developed to a FAR superior extent in Hebrew than English. It's in the grammar - Hebrew's built for that stuff.
English can rely, on the other hand, on its much vaster vocabulary. A vocabulary that comes to replace the fact that it doesn't decline its nouns as well as Latin (or Hebrew noun-forms), nor conjugate its verbs to the same extent as Arabic. To get all the small meanings through, English has a HUGE resevoir of semantic tradition, a tradition that - to achieve parallel beauty - requires use of the PERFECT WORDS in the perfect order (Coleridge's definition of poetry).
Don't get me wrong, I love Shakespeare's works, I memorise and translate his sonnets and I act his plays. I even write in Elizabethan language myself sometimes, and cram more meaning into less words - but it's all fantasy. To achieve the beauty of poetic message conveyed best in the simplest of words, without all the complex themes that nurture academic destruction of poetry, one must take advantage of the language - and the right type of advantage. To date, I have not seen a poet who matches the brilliance of Yeats (a traditionalist modernist) in bringing tears to the public's eyes through his depth reflected in his plain wording.
Not to say - by any means - that I follow it well, but we could all take a leaf out of Yeats's books, especially his poem "Adam's Curse".
And that's why I don't regard shakespeare as the best English-language poet. I'm sorry if at any point I was being harsh, I'm just stating my opinion here.
Thanks for sharing the sonnets again, have a nice day!
Jonathan
