William Shakespeare
Quick answer: A craft guide to William Shakespeare for poets: how his sonnets turn on the volta, how he bends iambic pentameter, and which poems to study first.
The sonnets are still the most studied 154 poems in English, and not only because of the plays attached to their author's name. They are a working manual in how to argue in verse: fourteen lines that set up a problem, complicate it, then reverse or resolve it before the couplet closes the door. If you write formal poetry, or simply want your free verse to end with more authority, Shakespeare's habits are worth stealing.
This page treats him as a craft teacher rather than a monument. Below are the specific, observable moves that run through the sonnets and the songs from the plays, and a practical way to fold each one into your own drafts.
The poem
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.
William Shakespeare, 'Sonnet 18' (1609)
Who Shakespeare was, briefly
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) worked as an actor, playwright and shareholder in London's theatre world during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Alongside the plays he wrote two long narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, and the sequence of 154 sonnets published in 1609.
He matters to working poets for a plain reason: he demonstrated how flexible iambic pentameter can be, and he perfected the English sonnet's three-quatrains-plus-couplet architecture. Poets from Keats to the present have learned their line by reading his.
The signature moves
Four techniques recur so reliably in the sonnets that you can set your watch by them.
What you can learn from him
Build a turn into every short poem you draft. Write your first eight lines as a claim, then force lines nine onward to push back against them; even in free verse this argumentative shape gives a poem spine. Next, check your metre for monotony: if every line scans identically, invert the first foot of one or two lines and listen to the difference. Finally, try the audit method with metaphor. Choose one comparison and stay with it for a full stanza, asking what the image says that literal statement cannot. Contest judges, including Writory's, score structure as its own category, and a clean volta is one of the fastest ways to show it.
Where to start reading
Begin with the sonnets rather than the narrative poems.
What poets can take from this
- Draft a sonnet argument in prose first: claim, complication, verdict.
- Read your pentameter aloud and mark any five lines in a row with identical stress patterns, then vary one.
- Give your final couplet a job: it should judge the poem, not summarise it.
- Steal Sonnet 130's trick and write a love poem that refuses every stock comparison.
- Keep one metaphor alive for at least four lines before introducing another.
Try it yourself
Write a fourteen-line poem that spends eight lines praising something ordinary, then turns at line nine to admit the praise is really about a person you miss.
Questions
What poems did Shakespeare write besides the plays?
He wrote 154 sonnets, published together in 1609, and two long narrative poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). Songs scattered through the plays are also studied as stand-alone lyrics.
What is the Shakespearean sonnet form?
Three quatrains rhyming abab cdcd efef followed by a couplet rhyming gg, written in iambic pentameter. The structure invites a turn of thought before the couplet.
Are Shakespeare's sonnets hard to read today?
Less than you might expect. The syntax takes a few poems to tune into, but the vocabulary is largely familiar, and a lightly annotated edition removes most obstacles.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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