Download or read book Last Looks Last Books written by Helen Vendler and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-01 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern American poets writing in the face of death In Last Looks, Last Books, the eminent critic Helen Vendler examines the ways in which five great modern American poets, writing their final books, try to find a style that does justice to life and death alike. With traditional religious consolations no longer available to them, these poets must invent new ways to express the crisis of death, as well as the paradoxical coexistence of a declining body and an undiminished consciousness. In The Rock, Wallace Stevens writes simultaneous narratives of winter and spring; in Ariel, Sylvia Plath sustains melodrama in cool formality; and in Day by Day, Robert Lowell subtracts from plenitude. In Geography III, Elizabeth Bishop is both caught and freed, while James Merrill, in A Scattering of Salts, creates a series of self-portraits as he dies, representing himself by such things as a Christmas tree, human tissue on a laboratory slide, and the evening/morning star. The solution for one poet will not serve for another; each must invent a bridge from an old style to a new one. Casting a last look at life as they contemplate death, these modern writers enrich the resources of lyric poetry.
Download or read book Seamus Heaney written by Helen Vendler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem "Among School Children." View her insightful and passionate analysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course. Poet and critic are well met, as one of our best writers on poetry takes up one of the world's great poets. Where other books on the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney have dwelt chiefly on the biographical, geographical, and political aspects of his writing, this book looks squarely and deeply at Heaney's poetry as art. A reading of the poet's development over the past thirty years, Seamus Heaney tells a story of poetic inventiveness, of ongoing experimentation in form and expression. It is an inspired and nuanced portrait of an Irish poet of public as well as private life, whose work has given voice to his troubled times. With characteristic discernment and eloquence, Helen Vendler traces Heaney's invention as it evolves from his beginnings in Death of a Naturalist (1966) through his most recent volume, The Spirit Level (1996). In sections entitled "Second Thoughts," she considers an often neglected but crucial part of Heaney's evolving talent: self-revision. Here we see how later poems return to the themes or genres of the earlier volumes, and reconceive them in light of the poet's later attitudes or techniques. Vendler surveys all of Heaney's efforts in the classical forms--genre scene, elegy, sonnet, parable, confessional poem, poem of perception--and brings to light his aesthetic and moral attitudes. Seamus Heaney's development as a poet is inextricably connected to the violent struggle that has racked Northern Ireland. Vendler shows how, from one volume to the next, Heaney has maintained vigilant attention toward finding a language for his time--"symbols adequate for our predicament," as he has said. The worldwide response to those discovered symbols suggests that their relevance extends far beyond this moment.
Download or read book Our Secret Discipline written by Helen Vendler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2007-11-29 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fundamental difference between rhetoric and poetry, according to Yeats, is that rhetoric is the expression of ones quarrels with others while poetry is the expression of ones quarrel with oneself. Through exquisite attention to outer and inner forms, Vendler explores the most inventive reaches of the poets mind.
Download or read book Dickinson written by Emily Dickinson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-07 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seamus Heaney, Denis Donoghue, William Pritchard, Marilyn Butler, Harold Bloom, and many others have praised Helen Vendler as one of the most attentive readers of poetry. Here, Vendler turns her illuminating skills as a critic to 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson. As she did in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, she serves as an incomparable guide, considering both stylistic and imaginative features of the poems. In selecting these poems for commentary Vendler chooses to exhibit many aspects of Dickinson’s work as a poet, “from her first-person poems to the poems of grand abstraction, from her ecstatic verses to her unparalleled depictions of emotional numbness, from her comic anecdotes to her painful poems of aftermath.” Included here are many expected favorites as well as more complex and less often anthologized poems. Taken together, Vendler’s selection reveals Emily Dickinson’s development as a poet, her astonishing range, and her revelation of what Wordsworth called “the history and science of feeling.” In accompanying commentaries Vendler offers a deeper acquaintance with Dickinson the writer, “the inventive conceiver and linguistic shaper of her perennial themes.” All of Dickinson’s preoccupations—death, religion, love, the natural world, the nature of thought—are explored here in detail, but Vendler always takes care to emphasize the poet’s startling imagination and the ingenuity of her linguistic invention. Whether exploring less familiar poems or favorites we thought we knew, Vendler reveals Dickinson as “a master” of a revolutionary verse-language of immediacy and power. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries will be an indispensable reference work for students of Dickinson and readers of lyric poetry.
Download or read book Poems Poets Poetry written by A Kingsley Porter University Professor Helen Vendler and published by Bedford Books. This book was released on 2013-12-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Soul Says written by Helen Vendler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work comprises essays on American, British and Irish poetry, showing contemporary life and culture captured in lyric form. It explains the power of poetry as the voice of the soul, rather than the socially marked self, speaking directly through the stylization of verse.
Download or read book Invisible Listeners written by Helen Vendler and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-09 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a poet addresses a living person--whether friend or enemy, lover or sister--we recognize the expression of intimacy. But what impels poets to leap across time and space to speak to invisible listeners, seeking an ideal intimacy--George Herbert with God, Walt Whitman with a reader in the future, John Ashbery with the Renaissance painter Francesco Parmigianino? In Invisible Listeners, Helen Vendler argues that such poets must invent the language that will enact, on the page, an intimacy they lack in life. Through brilliantly insightful and gracefully written readings of these three great poets over three different centuries, Vendler maps out their relationships with their chosen listeners. For his part, Herbert revises the usual "vertical" address to God in favor of a "horizontal" one-addressing God as a friend. Whitman hovers in a sometimes erotic, sometimes quasi-religious language in conceiving the democratic camerado, who will, following Whitman's example, find his true self. And yet the camerado will be replaced, in Whitman's verse, by the ultimate invisible listener, Death. Ashbery, seeking a fellow artist who believes that art always distorts what it represents, finds he must travel to the remote past. In tones both tender and skeptical he addresses Parmigianino, whose extraordinary self-portrait in a convex mirror furnishes the poet with both a theory and a precedent for his own inventions. By creating the forms and speech of ideal intimacy, these poets set forth the possibility of a more complete and satisfactory human interchange--an ethics of relation that is uncoerced, understanding, and free.
Download or read book The Music of what Happens written by Helen Vendler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of previously published book reviews of modern poetry. The poets discussed include John Ashbery, Donald Davie, Allen Ginsberg, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Wallace Stevens.
Download or read book The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth century American Poetry written by Rita Dove and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 2011 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology of twentieth-century American poetry, featuring Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Derek Walcott, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Anne Sexton, and many others.
Download or read book Part of Nature Part of Us written by Helen Vendler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1980 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of book reviews and essays on more than forty modern American poets.
Download or read book The Poetry of George Herbert written by A Kingsley Porter University Professor Helen Vendler and published by . This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Something Understood written by Stephanie Burt and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Helen Vendler may be America's most important poetry critic. A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Vendler has remained a key figure in the academy while also teaching a much larger public how to read and enjoy poems and poetry through her many articles for the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, the New Republic, and the New York Review of Books. With Something Understood, some of the most important poets, critics, and scholars in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Ireland pay tribute to five decades of Vendler's work. Included here are new poems, written especially for this volume, from such luminaries as Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, former U.S. poet laureate Rita Dove, and Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Wright. The essays, also exclusive to this book, address a spectrum of issues, from the vastness of the poetic tradition to poetry's irreducible building blocks. Elaine Scarry considers what poetic vocation has meant to Heaney, Thomas Hardy, and to Vendler herself. Deborah Forbes asks what the poems of John Keats have to say to the people of Zambia. Jahan Ramazani provides arguments and advice that any teacher of poetry can use. All the contributors have learned from Helen Vendler or been inspired by her work. The result is not only a celebration of Vendler's critical powers but also a major compilation of poems and essays representing contemporary American poetry as it is practiced and debated. ContributorsJohn Ashbery * Frank Bidart * Lucie Brock-Broido * Stephen Burt * Eleanor Cook * Bonnie Costello * Rita Dove * Heather Dubrow * William Flesch * Deborah Forbes * Mark Ford * Roger Gilbert * Albert Goldbarth * Jorie Graham * Nick Halpern * DeSales Harrison * Seamus Heaney * August Kleinzahler * George S. Lensing * Christopher R. Miller * Carl Phillips * D. A. Powell * Laura Quinney * Jahan Ramazani * Elaine Scarry * Dave Smith * Willard Spiegelman * M. Wynn Thomas * Charles Wright
Download or read book Coming of Age as a Poet written by Helen Vendler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With characteristic precision, authority, and grace, Vendler helps readers to appreciate the conception and practice of poetry as she explores four poets and their first "perfect" works. 4 halftones.
Download or read book The Ocean the Bird and the Scholar written by Helen Vendler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-11 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Times Higher Education Book of the Week One of our foremost commentators on poetry examines the work of a broad range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English, Irish, and American poets. The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar gathers two decades’ worth of Helen Vendler’s essays, book reviews, and occasional prose—including the 2004 Jefferson Lecture—in a single volume. “It’s one of [Vendler’s] finest books, an impressive summation of a long, distinguished career in which she revisits many of the poets she has venerated over a lifetime and written about previously. Reading it, one can feel her happiness in doing what she loves best. There is scarcely a page in the book where there isn’t a fresh insight about a poet or poetry.” —Charles Simic, New York Review of Books “Vendler has done perhaps more than any other living critic to shape—I might almost say ‘create’—our understanding of poetry in English.” —Joel Brouwer, New York Times Book Review “Poems are artifacts and [Vendler] shows us, often thrillingly, how those poems she considers the best specimens are made...A reader feels that she has thoroughly absorbed her subjects and conveys her understanding with candor, clarity, wit.” —John Greening, Times Literary Supplement
Download or read book The Breaking of Style written by Helen Vendler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vendler's masterful study of changes in style yields a new view of the interplay of moral, emotional, and intellectual forces in a poet's work. Throughout, Vendler reminds us that what distinguishes successful poetry is a mastery of language at all levels--including the rhythmic, the grammatical, and the graphic.
Download or read book Poets Thinking written by Helen Vendler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry has often been considered an irrational genre, more expressive than logical, more meditative than given to coherent argument. And yet, in each of the four very different poets she considers here, Helen Vendler reveals a style of thinking in operation; although they may prefer different means, she argues, all poets of any value are thinkers. The four poets taken up in this volume--Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and William Butler Yeats--come from three centuries and three nations, and their styles of thinking are characteristically idiosyncratic. Vendler shows us Pope performing as a satiric miniaturizer, remaking in verse the form of the essay, Whitman writing as a poet of repetitive insistence for whom thinking must be followed by rethinking, Dickinson experimenting with plot to characterize life's unfolding, and Yeats thinking in images, using montage in lieu of argument. With customary lucidity and spirit, Vendler traces through these poets' lines to find evidence of thought in lyric, the silent stylistic measures representing changes of mind, the condensed power of poetic thinking. Her work argues against the reduction of poetry to its (frequently well-worn) themes and demonstrates, instead, that there is always in admirable poetry a strenuous process of thinking, evident in an evolving style--however ancient the theme--that is powerful and original.
Download or read book Wallace Stevens written by Helen Vendler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this graceful book, Helen Vendler brings her remarkable skills to bear on a number of Stevens' short poems. She shows us that this most intellectual of poets is in fact the most personal of poets; that his words are not devoted to epistemological questions alone but are also "words chosen out of desire."
