“Of all the great love lyrics, Shakespeare’s sonnets are the most relentlessly mysterious and even mystical in expression…”

…is love just the sentimentalist’s word for sex? This is what makes the fascination with Shakespeare’s sonnets so understandable. Of all the great love lyrics, Shakespeare’s sonnets are the most relentlessly mysterious and even mystical in expression, and the most entirely carnal and physical in foundation. We want them to be all about love and keep finding that they are all about sex.

They are also, perhaps for that reason, the most often argued-over sequence of love poems in any language.

Adam Gopnik, “June, Moon, Tune”, The New Yorker (6 & 13 July 2015), 80.