Helen Vendler
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
A dazzling short assessment of the life and work of the poet and winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for literature. Among Heaney's many published collections are 'Death of a Naturalist', 'North', 'Field Work', 'Station Island' and 'Spirit Level' (May 1996), which was that rarest of things: a collection of poetry that was also a bestseller. Yet despite his popularity, Heaney's poetry can be difficult and intractable, not least because it is linked to two...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Helen Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor of English at Harvard University. Her most recent books include Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats; Coming of Age As a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath; and Seamus Heaney. Her reviews of contemporary poetry and criticism have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the New Republic, and other publications.
When a poet addresses a living person--whether friend...
Author
Series
Language
English
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Description
Vendler "examines the ways in which five great modern American poets, writing their final books, try to find a style that does justice to life and death. With traditional religious consolations no longer available to them, these poets must invent new ways to express the crisis of death, as well as the paradoxical coexistence of a declining body and an undiminished consciousness ... The solution for one poet will not serve for another; each must invent...
Author
Series
Language
English
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Description
"While recovering from a mental collapse in a Swiss sanitarium in 1921, T.S. Eliot finished what would become the definitive poem of the modern condition, and one that still casts a large and ominous shadow over twentieth-century poetry. Built upon the imagery of the Grail legend, the Fisher King, and ancient fertility cults, "The Waste Land" is both a poetic diagnosis of an ailing civilization and a desperate quest for spiritual renewal. Through...
Author
Language
English
Description
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...
Author
Publisher
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Language
English
Description
In detailed commentaries on Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, the author 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.
Author
Publisher
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Pub. Date
1995
Language
English
Description
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...
Author
Publisher
Harvard University Press
Pub. Date
1995
Language
English
Description
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...