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The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar

Author: Helen Vendler

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2015-05-11

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 0674736567

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

Dickinson

Author: Emily Dickinson

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2010-09-07

Total Pages: 552

ISBN-13: 0674048679

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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.

Coming of Age as a Poet

Author: Helen Vendler

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 9780674010246

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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.

Poets Thinking

Author: Helen Vendler

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-06-30

Total Pages: 155

ISBN-13: 0674044622

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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.

Part of Nature, Part of Us

Author: Helen Vendler

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1980

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 9780674654761

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A collection of book reviews and essays on more than forty modern American poets.

On Extended Wings

Author: Helen Vendler

Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press

Published: 1969

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13:

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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."

Seamus Heaney

Author: Helen Vendler

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780674002050

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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.

Wallace Stevens

Author: Helen Vendler

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 98

ISBN-13: 9780674945753

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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."

The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry

Author: Helen Vendler

Publisher: Belknap Press

Published: 1985

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13:

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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. The poetry collected in this volume reveals the range and power of the contemporary American imagination. The verve, freedom, and boldness of American English are combined with the new harmonies of modern cadence. Here are distillations of twentieth-century perception, feeling, and thought, and reflections of changing social realities, scientific and psychoanalytic insights, and the strong voices of feminism and black consciousness. This is a book for those who value fresh and original poetry and for readers worldwide who are curious about contemporary American experience. Helen Vendler relies on her own taste and judgment in singling out excellent poems, beginning with the late modernist flowering of Wallace Stevens and continuing to the present. Her wide-ranging Introduction places recent American poetry in its aesthetic and social contexts. The anthology provides an extensive offering of the work of major poets and introduces many writers who are only now beginning to make their reputation. Thirty-five poets are included, with a representative selection from the earlier to later work of each and a significant number of long poems. Brief biographies of the poets are appended.

The Music of what Happens

Author: Helen Vendler

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 494

ISBN-13: 9780674591523

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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.