The sonnets of Shakespeare

He who does not yet know the Shakespearean sonnets has before him an encounter with spacious thoughts that will profoundly stir his heart. As unpremeditated as the song of a bird, this matchless verse wells forth, now eloquent with human feeling, now adorned with the lyric beauty of universal nature, now appealing to the sense of truth and justice; but always with an undertone of something beyond and within the words that leaves the reader pondering. And if he is willing to keep on pondering over the space of a few weeks, months, or even years, he may in time come to identify himself with the "I" of the sonnets, and see himself in very truth as the archetypal man about whom the poet might have been writing.

Madeline Clark, The Eternal Self in Shakespeare's Sonnets

References: See Stephen Denning, Sonnets 2000(iUniverse, October 2000)