Sonnets of Shakespeare's Ghost

In 1920, Gregory Thornton composed these sonnets as a conversation across centuries. The speaker addresses the specter of Shakespeare himself, seeking counsel on matters of the heart and art. What emerges is a meditation on love that resists easy categorization, passionate, Platonic, aching, and undefinable. Thornton writes in the Elizabethan form but infuses it with modernist uncertainty: can love truly transcend society's constraints, or is that merely what lovers tell themselves in the dark? The poems grapple with authenticity against skepticism, beauty against mortality, and the eternal question of whether genuine expression is possible in a world quick to judge. Each sonnet pulses with longing and intellectual rigor, making these not mere pastiche but sincere inquiries into what it means to love and to write about love when both feel like acts of defiance.