Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 55’ reads:

“Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.”

The Arden Shakespeare’s new collection On Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Poets' Celebration was launched in King’s College London’s Great Hall, which hosted ten of the most celebrated poets of the modern day. Shakespeare hoped that his sonnets would withstand time. The Arden collection, which invites thirty poets to respond to Shakespeare’s work, demonstrates his success in a collaborative effort with the Royal Society of Literature, celebrating the posterity of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Each poet read the Shakespearean sonnet that they had chosen to interpret, spoke about their process, and read their own work. Mimi Khalvati spoke about her son’s schizophrenia in ‘Hearing Voices’ via Shakespearean punning on the word ‘sun’. Many of the poets were concerned with the sonnet’s ‘turn’ or Volta, as a device to meditate on the passage of time. Ruth Padel considers this in her poem ‘Your Life as a Wave’. She writes, “Let’s reverse the metaphor”, highlighting this pivot that is so integral to the sonnet’s structure.

The readings explored what Shakespeare’s sonnets mean to us. What they mean to these particular poets is captured in this new book. The interpretations, like Shakespeare’s poetry, are all strikingly visual. Pulitzer prize winner Paul Muldoon titled his sonnet ‘A Graft’. As Margreta de Grazia, who hosted the launch, pointed out, the interpretation of the commission as a graft reveals Shakespeare in a new way. By maintaining the original end rhyme from ‘Sonnet 15’, Muldoon literalises the grafting process.

On Shakespeare’s Sonnets, edited by Hannah Crawforth and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, honours Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets. However, it does not get lost in the lauding of his genius. Instead it is a reimagining of what Don Paterson cheekily called, “A wee square poem.”