Sonnets
154 sonnets that constitute the most sustained meditation on love, time, jealousy, and mortality in the English language. The Fair Youth sequence, the Dark Lady poems, and the Rival Poet (whoever they were) have generated more literary scholarship than almost any other body of work. Sonnet 18 and Sonnet 130 are taught in every high school; the complete sequence remains inexhaustible.
Seventeen consecutive sonnets open the sequence by urging one young man to reproduce, and the repetition wears thin long before the famous ones arrive. Read in order, they promise a story that never resolves; the order may be the printer's anyway. And the 'Will' puns in the Dark Lady stretch run that joke well past its last laugh.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
