Shakespearean Swag: Our Favorite Literary Annotations on Rap Genius

O, O, O, O yeah

Since Rap Genius launched Poetry Genius in 2012, our editors have worked alongside students, teachers, writers, and addictive readers of all kinds to create thousands of annotations on literary texts. Today we've taken a look back and compiled some of our favorites into a face-melting fire-fangled arsenal of knowledge bombs.

Click the links in each annotation below to jump to the relevant passage on Poetry Genius. Remember, this school works both ways: if our interpretation fails to dazzle you, why not suggest one of your own?

Dive in and check out:

• Rhythm as explained by poetry critic I. A. Richards and Wu-Tang's "C.R.E.A.M."

• What Beatrice really means when she asks Benedick if he'll "eat his word."

• Why Russell and Wittgenstein are the Jay Z and Kanye of philosophy.

• Commentary on the American Dream (and connections to Tennyson and Faulkner) in the final line of Gatsby.

• Why Jane Austen might have chosen to gloss over the climactic proposal in Pride and Prejudice.

• Junot Díaz on why he "simply [went] buckwild" like Melville in an Oscar Wao footnote.

• The progression of cocktails in John Cheever's "The Swimmer."

• Every shade of beauty Langston Hughes celebrates in "Harlem Sweeties."

• Shakespearean swag.

• William Empson's masterful handling of the villanelle form.

• Wilfred Owen's deployment of nasal consonant sounds in "Maundy Thursday."

• Grimm's Law and historical linguistics.

• Stephen Dedalus's navel-gazing in Ulysses.

• Rampant inflation in the land where the Bong-Tree grows?

• Marianne Moore, James Wright, and Fall Out Boy on the loneliness of relationships.

• The birds and the bees, as explained by Chaucer. (Fine, just the birds.)

• The Gwendolyn Brooks elegy that fulfills the goal of all elegies.

• The Nietzsche line about nostrils that inspired a line by Das Racist.

• Bonus: How the Architect in The Matrix knew Neo would be coming to talk to him.