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 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an examination of lyric form in the poetry of W. B. Yeats.
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 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 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 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 On Extended Wings written by Helen Vendler and published by Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1969 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though Wallace Stevens' shorter poems are perhaps his best known, his longer poems, Helen Hennessy Vendler suggests in this book, deserve equal fame and equal consideration. Stevens' central theme--the worth of the imagination--remained with him all his life, and Mrs. Vendler therefore proposes that his development as a poet can best be seen, not in description--which must be repetitive--of the abstract bases of his work, but rather in a view of his changing styles. The author presents here a chronological account of fourteen longer poems that span a thirty-year period, showing, through Stevens' experiments in genre, diction, syntax, voice, imagery, and meter, the inventive variety of Stevens' work in long forms, and providing at the same time a coherent reading of these difficult poems. She concludes, "Stevens was engaged in constant experimentation all his life in an attempt to find the appropriate vehicle for his expansive consciousness; he found it in his later long poems, which surpass in value the rest of his work."
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 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 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 The Odes of John Keats written by Helen Vendler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1983 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that Keat's six odes form a sequence, identifies their major themes, and provides detailed interpretations of the poems' philosophy, mythological references, and lyric structures.
Download or read book Sweet Days of Discipline written by Fleur Jaeggy and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the heels of I Am the Brother of XX and These Possible Lives, here is Jaeggy's fabulously witchy first book in English, with a new Peter Mendelsund cover A novel about obsessive love and madness set in postwar Switzerland, Fleur Jaeggy’s eerily beautiful novel begins innocently enough: “At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell.” But there is nothing innocent here. With the off-handed remorselessness of a young Eve, the narrator describes her potentially lethal designs to win the affections of Fréderique, the apparently perfect new girl. In Tim Parks’ consummate translation (with its “spare, haunting quality of a prose poem,” TLS), Sweet Days of Discipline is a peerless, terrifying, and gorgeous work.
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."
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 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 A Sacerdotal Poetics written by Kathryn Wills and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2023-03-06 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new way of understanding the old conflict between iconophiles and iconoclasts by exploring the way images in poetry are used by one poet, W. B. Yeats, and his translator, Yves Bonnefoy. Using the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion as a tool of interpretation, the book suggests further that translation is a significant act in which one entire theological world of a Protestant poet may become a completely different, Catholic one when the translation is performed by a culturally Catholic poet. For Bonnefoy, therefore, the act of translation becomes a profound act of hope.
Download or read book The Living Stream written by Warwick Gould and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2013 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memories of the man are shared by Seamus Heaney, Christopher Rush and Colin Smythe, who compiles a bibliography of Jeffares’s work. Terence Brown, Neil Corcoran, Warwick Gould, Joseph M. Hassett, Phillip L. Marcus, Ann Saddlemyer, Ronald Schuchard, Deirdre Toomey and Helen Vendler offer essays on such topics as Yeats and the Colours of Poetry, Yeats’s Shakespeare, Yeats and Seamus Heaney, Lacrimae Rerum and Tragic Joy, Raftery’s work on Yeats’s Thoor Ballylee, Edmund Dulac’s portrait of Mrs George Yeats, The Tower as an anti-Modernist monument, with close studies of ‘Vacillation’, ‘Her Triumph’, and ‘The Cold Heaven’. Throughout, the essays are inflected with memories of Jeffares and his critical methods. The volume is rounded with further essays on A Vision by Neil Mann and Matthew de Forrest, while reviews of recent editions and studies are provided by Matthew Campbell, Wayne K. Chapman, Sandra Clark, Denis Donoghue, Nicholas Grene, Joseph M. Hassett, and K.P.S. Jochum. Yeats Annual is published by Open Book Publishers in association with the Institute of English Studies, University of London.
Download or read book Revisionary Play written by Harry Berger (Jr.) and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What critic of Spenser's poetry does not know, and acknowledge, a debt to Harry Berger? The collection, at last, of these seminal essays into a single volume is welcome news indeed for the generation of scholars who learned from them and can now more easily send their own students to them. . . . Their importance as documents of the discovery of Spenser, and the Spenserian mode, in the 1960s is given new prominence, moreover, by Berger's recent essays here on the 'metapastoralism' of The Shepheardes Calendar. In them, this New Critic comes home again to Spenser, recognizing the value of recent critical trends but arguing passionately for the centrality of the close reading of text. The result is a powerful case for reconciliation and consolidation of methods that have dominated literary study over the second half of this century."--Donald Cheney, co-editor of The Spenser Encyclopedia
