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Jan 1, 1933 — Jan 1, 2024· 91 yrs

UNITED STATES AUTHOR · POETRY · CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION

Helen Hennessy Vendler

Also known as: Helen Vendler, HELEN VENDLER

24
BOOKS
4.5
AVG RATING (2)
2
READERS

Helen Vendler (née Hennessy; April 30, 1933 – April 23, 2024) was an American academic, writer and literary critic. She was a professor of English language and history at Boston University, Cornell, Harvard, and other universities. Her academic focus was critical analysis of poetry and she studied poets from Shakespeare and George Herbert to modern poets such as Wallace Stevens and Seamus Heaney. Her technique was close reading, which she described as "reading from the point of view of a writer". Vendler reviewed poetry regularly for periodicals including The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.

Boston, United States
Wikipedia

I begin by proposing an antithetical formula as the motto for post-Emersonian American poetry: Everything that can be broken should be broken.

— from Wallace Stevens

Most acclaimed

#1

Seamus Heaney

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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 - elegy, genre-scene, sonnet, parable, confessional poem, poem of perception - and brings to light his aesthetic and moral attitudes.

#2

The art of Shakespeare's sonnets

1997

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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.

#3

Wallace Stevens

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"Wallace Stevens, one of this century's foremost American poets, has been both praised and blamed for the 'difficulty' of his poems, and has bemused those seeking to reconcile the sobriety of his career as an insurance lawyer with the extravagance of his poetry. Tony Sharpe explores the symbiotic and antagonistic relations between Stevens's literary life and his working life as a senior executive, outlining the personal, historical and publishing contexts which shaped his writing career, and suggesting how awareness of these contexts throws new light on the poems."--BOOK JACKET.

Books

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