"In reminding us to look at and listen to the actual words on the page...Vendler invites us to expand our response to experience, and to find in it--if we are both attentive and lucky--beauty and solace."
--Christopher Benfey, New York Review of Books
The grand dame of poetic criticism defends lyric poetry as a product of fierce intelligence as much as creative inspiration. 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. All poets of any value are thinkers, she argues, even if no two think alike.
The four poets taken up in this volume--Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and William Butler Yeats--come from three different centuries and three different nations, and their styles of thinking are characteristically idiosyncratic. Vendler gives 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 vigor, Vendler pores over these poets' lines to find evidence of thought in lyric, from subtle stylistic shifts that embody changes of mind to images that serve as condensations of concepts and emotions. Far more than in (frequently well-worn) themes, she demonstrates that poetic genius resides in open-ended contemplation: the interminable work of recalling, evaluating, and structuring experience in verse. Never linear or merely propositional, poems show us the human mind in process, inviting us to participate in experiential discoveries as they unfold.
Author: Helen Vendler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 04/01/2006
Pages: 160
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.43lbs
Size: 7.96h x 5.56w x 0.47d
ISBN: 9780674021105
About the Author
Vendler, Helen: - Helen Vendler (1933-2024) was a leading poetry critic and the author of nineteen books on poets from William Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney. A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, she contributed regularly to the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, and the New Republic. She was the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.
