-"By your standards Shakespeare's sonnets would not be poetry either, since some of those have very much been worried into being (take sonnet
104, for instance). You might try broadening your tastes." Brian Boyd

The argument doesn't hold, because the premise is that for the sonnet sequence to function all must adhere to some coherent level of the poetical. Auden I think thought a mere third excellent, most of the rest readable for one or two spots of memorable phrasing, and a handful little more than dutiful duds. This fact of course does not alter the general judgement of modern taste that the sequence constitutes an extraordinary achievement of sustained poetical intensities. When Shakespeare falters, most accomplished poets, fluttering in the lower airs, would admire the pindaric hovering above them.

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