Why didn Shakespeare name his sonnets?
Rarely is it possible to say why someone doesn’t do something. Shakespeare did not, as far as we know, publish the sonnets himself or see them through the press. The 1609 book in other words was not an authorized edition; it was done without the author’s consent. However, many poets do not give titles to their works. In modern instances–e. g., Auden–poets often believe that the title may diminish the full experience of the poem. Reading the poem in its entirety and submitting to its tropes, its language, its devices is the best way to encounter the fulness of the vision. In the case of Shakspeare’s sonnets, the whole constitutes a sequence or set of attitudes and confrontations that titles would pigeonhole or reduce to something less. However, whether that was Shakespeare’s intention or not is simply impossible to say. Good question. There is no answer to it, though.
