Helen Hennessy Vendler

When a poet addresses a living person, we recognise the intimacy being evoked, but what causes a poet to invoke invisible listeners? Helen Vendler explores this area of poetry, focusing on the works of George Herbert, Walt Whitman and John Ashbery.

"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 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." "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."--BOOK JACKET.

"To find a personal style is, for a writer, to become adult; and to write one's first "perfect" poem - a poem that wholly and successfully embodies that style - is to come of age as a poet. By looking at the precedents, circumstances, and artistry of the first perfect poems composed by John Milton, John Keats, T. S. Eliot, and Sylvia Plath, Coming of Age as a Poet offers rare insight into this mysterious process, and into the indispensable period of learning and experimentation that precedes such poetic achievement.". "Milton's L'Allegro, Keats's On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and Plath's The Colossus are the poems that Helen Vendler considers, exploring each as an accession to poetic confidence, mastery, and maturity. In meticulous and sympathetic readings of the poems, and with reference to earlier youthful compositions, she delineates the context and the terms of each poet's self-discovery - and illuminates the private, intense, and ultimately heroic effort and endurance that precede the creation of any memorable poem."--BOOK JACKET.

In detailed commentaries on Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, Vendler reveals previously unperceived imaginative and stylistic features of the poems, pointing out not only new levels of import in particular lines, but also the ways in which the four parts of each sonnet work together to enact emotion and create dynamic effect. The commentaries - presented alongside the complete text of each poem, as printed in the 1609 edition and in a modernized version - offer fresh perspectives on the individual poems, and, taken together, provide a full picture of Shakespeare's techniques as a working poet. With the help of Vendler's acute eye, we gain an appreciation of "Shakespeare's elated variety of invention, his ironic capacity, his astonishing refinement of technique, and, above all, the reach of his skeptical imaginative intent.". Vendler's understanding of the sonnets informs her readings on an accompanying compact disk, which is bound with the book. This recorded presentation of a selection of the poems, in giving aural form to Shakespeare's words, heightens our awareness of voice in lyric and adds the dimension of sound to poems too often registered merely as written words.

Style is the material body of lyric poetry, Helen Vendler suggests. To cast off an earlier style is to perform an act of violence on the self. Why might a poet do this, adopting a sharply different form? In this exploration of three kinds of break in poetic style, Vendler clarifies the essential connection between style and substance in poetry. Opening fresh perspectives on the work of three very different poets, her masterful study of changes in style yields a new view of the interplay of moral, emotional, and intellectual forces in a poet's work.

How does a poet repeatedly over a lifetime make art out of an arbitrary assignment of fate? By asking this question of the work of four American poets - two men of the postwar generation, two young women writing today - Helen Vendler suggests a fruitful way of looking at a poet's career and a new way of understanding poetic strategies as both mastery of forms and forms of mastery.

To know the poetry of our time, to look through its lenses and filters, is to see our lives illuminated. In these eloquent essays on recent American, British, and Irish poetry, Helen Vendler shows us contemporary life and culture captured in lyric form by some of our most celebrated poets. An incomparable reader of poetry, Vendler explains its power; it is, she says, the voice of the soul rather than the socially marked self speaking directly to us through the stylization of verse. "Soul Says," the title of a poem by Jorie Graham, is thus the name of this collection.

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 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.

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

"In this original and revealing book, the author analyzes twelve of Yeats' later plays, relating them to A Vision whose symbolism they share"--Cover.

In selecting these poems for commentary the author 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, this 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 the author 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 the author 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, the author reveals Dickinson as a master of a revolutionary verse language of immediacy and power. Here, the author turns her skills as a critic to 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson. She serves as a guide, considering both stylistic and imaginative feature of the poems.