“Men woo women with wit and charm, women respond with doubt and fatalism.” Discuss.

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"Men woo women with wit and charm, women respond with doubt and fatalism." Discuss.

The first sonnets were written by Francesco Petrarca, who traditionally wrote about admiration for an unattainable woman. These poems were simple and described the physical appearance of a woman usually using similes. There were very few female poets around at this time to respond to this kind of poetry and it was not until the eighteen hundreds was there a real voice from female sonneteers.

The women responding to Shakespearean poems were better educated and saw the world differently from the male poets before them. Therefore, it is difficult to say what the women were responding to, because they are not directly responding to these men. Shakespeare's poems were very artificial and he used the old ideas and modified their usage in the poem to show off. His sonnets were all about the woman's physical appearance.

However, Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in 1892, died in 1950 she was an American, and born in Maine, her poetry was different because in the early 1900's there was a rejection of traditional poetry.

She was renowned for the lack of structure in her poems, and had a wider experience of life, as she was a bohemian. Millay's poems were an expression of her feelings, she was not trying to impress anyone and she did not work for the money. However, Shakespeare relied on his poetry to be accepted by society for his income. Millay was an educated woman looking at the world through experienced eyes she was not to be charmed by the superficial sonnets of Shakespeare, as Shakespeare was writing for a completely different audience.
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It is evident that in Shakespeare's " Shall I compare thee...?" he is trying to woo a certain women with wit and charm. Shakespeare is able to show his wit through contradicting the traditional way of comparing women to the beauty of nature. Shakespeare suggests that she is superior to the typical comparisons of a summer's day as she will "not fade". This is taking the conventional Petrachan ideas about wooing and beauty and reversing them. Shakespeare using his wit and charm is flattering this woman by saying she is more overpowering than the beauty of a summers ...

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