Helen Vendler - Böcker

“Brilliant ...full of perceptions and rewards that send one scurrying back to the text.” —John Bayley, New York Review of BooksThe finest reader of her generation retraces four great poets’ first steps across the threshold of genius.To find a personal style is, for a writer, to become an 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—illuminating the private, intense, and ultimately heroic effort and endurance that precede the creation of any memorable poem.With characteristic precision, authority, and grace, Vendler helps us to appreciate anew the conception and the practice of poetry, and to observe firsthand the living organism that breathes through the lines of a great poem.

“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 BooksThe 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.

“An intellectual feast.” —John Leonard, Harper’s MagazineA monumental study reveals the patient and meticulous labor behind the Irish Nobel laureate’s immaculate poetic craft.The fundamental difference between rhetoric and poetry, according to Yeats, is that rhetoric is the expression of one’s quarrels with others while poetry is the expression (and sometimes the resolution) of one’s quarrel with oneself. This is where Helen Vendler’s Our Secret Discipline begins. Through exquisite attention to outer and inner forms, Vendler explores the most inventive reaches of the poet’s mind. This book is a space-clearing gesture, an attempt to write about lyric forms in Yeats in unprecedented and comprehensive ways. The secret discipline of the poet is his vigilant attention to forms—whether generic, structural, or metrical. Yeats explores the potential of such forms to give shape and local habitation to volatile thoughts and feelings.Helen Vendler remains focused on questions of singular importance: Why did Yeats cast his poems into the widely differing forms they ultimately took? Can we understand Yeats’s poetry better if we pay attention to its form, both its internal architectonic and its external organization into conventional verse structures? Chapters of the book take up many Yeatsian ventures, such as the sonnet, the lyric sequence, paired poems, blank verse, and others. With elegance and precision, Vendler offers brilliant insights into the creative process and speculates on Yeats’s aims as he writes and rewrites some of the most famous poems in modern literature.

“The best close reader of poems to be found on the literary pages.”—Seamus Heaney“[Vendler’s] succinct but astute readings of Emily Dickinson’s poetry are little kernels of insight into a wickedly keen poetic mind.”—Hillary Kelly, New RepublicAn interpretive introduction to Dickinson’s brilliant, enigmatic verse from the unrivaled doyenne of close reading.Seamus Heaney, Denis Donoghue, William Pritchard, Marilyn Butler, Harold Bloom, and many others have praised Helen Vendler as one of the best readers of our time. Here, Vendler applies her critical powers to 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson. As she did in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, she serves as an incomparable guide, illuminating both stylistic and imaginative features of the poems.Vendler’s selection highlights the astounding variety of Dickinson’s work, “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.” In accompanying commentaries Vendler also acquaints us 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 offers a unique window into Dickinson’s oeuvre—her incredible range, her unique path of poetic development, and her mastery of what Wordsworth called “the history and science of feeling.” Lucid and accessible, this will long remain an indispensable reference for students of Dickinson and readers of lyric poetry.

"Lucid and elegant...a tour de force."—A. O. Scott, The NationThree lectures on the fraught process of poetic development from a titan of contemporary criticism. Style is the material body of lyric poetry. To cast off an earlier style is to commit an act of violence against the creative self. Why do poets so often make these dramatic breaks? In her 1994 Richard Ellman Lectures, Helen Vendler investigates poets’ motives for inventing a new voice, along with their means of doing so. Exploring three archetypal ruptures, she yields a new view of the interplay of moral, emotional, and intellectual forces in each poet’s work.Gerard Manley Hopkins’s invention of sprung rhythm marks a radical break with his early style. Rhythm, Vendler shows us, is at the heart of Hopkins’s aesthetic, and sprung rhythm is his symbol for danger, difference, and the shock of the beautiful. In Seamus Heaney’s work, she identifies clear shifts in grammatical “atmosphere” from one poem to the next—from “nounness” to the “betweenness” of an adverbial style—shifts whose moral and political implications come under scrutiny here. And finally, Vendler looks at Jorie Graham’s departure from short lines to numbered lines to squared long lines of sentences, marking a move from “deliberation” to cinematic “freeze-framing” to “coverage,” each with its own meaning in this poet’s career.Throughout, Vendler reminds us that what distinguishes successful poetry is a mastery of language at all levels—including the rhythmic, the grammatical, and the graphic. A lucid reading of three poets and a superb exposition of the craft of poetry, The Breaking of Style revives our lapsed sense of what style means.

“Essential Vendler.”—Chicago TribuneA leading partisan of close reading defends aesthetics as the beating heart of criticism.The late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed a sea change in literary criticism. As deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, and other currents dethroned the New Criticism in the American academy, those who held fast to formalist approaches appeared increasingly outmoded. Critics, as Helen Vendler put it, had been “put on notice” by literary theory.Fortunately, Vendler was up to the challenge. The essays and reviews collected in The Music of What Happens make a defiantly unfashionable case for her stalwart aestheticism. According to Vendler, the critic’s job is neither to interpret the poem, uncovering the secret meaning lurking beneath its surfaces, nor to unmask its ideological underpinnings, but to describe how the interplay of form and signification creates a unique and cohesive aesthetic experience. Good criticism illuminates the qualities that make each poem unlike any other: it explains not only what happens in the text but also, as Seamus Heaney once wrote, “the music of what happens.” Including magisterial assessments of her fellow critics and literary theorists, from Roland Barthes and Geoffrey Hartman to Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling, as well as characteristically acute appraisals of a wide range of contemporary and canonical poets, The Music of What Happens shows the rich dividends that accrue when we treat literature as a fine art like painting or sculpture rather than a discourse to be decoded and evaluated in social and historical terms. Above all, we become more attuned to the pleasures of reading—and even the pleasures of criticism itself.

“Simply superb.”—The NationA landmark study reconstructs the magnificent architecture of Keats’s odes beam by beam. With the exception of Shakespeare, John Keats has garnered more critical attention than probably any other English poet, above all for his six great odes. Composed in the span of just a few months in 1819, the odes mark the high point of Keats’s all-too-short literary career, forming, as Helen Vendler puts it, “the group of works in which the English language finds an ultimate embodiment.” Even with the mountain of criticism that precedes it, The Odes of John Keats nonetheless accomplishes something bracingly new: it reveals that the odes, typically read separately, demand to be read as a unified whole. Only when we read them together, Vendler argues, do we see how each ode builds upon, and contradicts, the one that came before it—a progression that expresses Keats’s sustained and deliberate inquiry into nature of creativity itself. From fruitless revery in “Ode on Indolence,” to successive explorations of music and mimetic art in “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” to the final triumph of lyric poetry in “To Autumn,” each ode advances tentative theses about the relationship between truth, beauty, and sensory experience, only to subsequently overturn them from a higher vantage point. Exquisitely attentive to the warp and weft of Keats’s “many languages,” from Greek mythology to eighteenth-century allegory, Vendler’s architectonic reading masterfully achieves criticism’s highest aim: keeping these classic poems, to borrow Keats’s own words, “forever warm and still to be enjoy’d.”

“Vendler is a commentator almost clairvoyant...Her book ought to be read, with care and gratitude, by every reader of Stevens, for no critic before her has understood so well his major poems.”—Harold Bloom, New York Times Book ReviewA virtuosic reading of Stevens’s most difficult poems brings their austere beauty and elaborately mannered movements to life.If “poetry is the subject of the poem,” as Wallace Stevens once declared, so too is the poet. A poet’s temperament, his attractions and repulsions, his sense of the world: all are integral to his style. And while Stevens’s short poems are perhaps his most anthologized, it is only in his longer works that we find his unique sensibilities on full display. Tracing the great modernist’s development through fourteen poems, from “Sunday Morning” (1915) to “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” (1949), Helen Vendler reveals the longer poems as the proving grounds where Stevens tested formal innovations and discovered his own formidable strengths. Chief among these, she argues, is a gift for equivocation. Neither ascetic nor hedonist, neither solipsist aesthete nor engaged poet of the social, Stevens “trembles always at halfway points.” He departs from his romantic forbears, deprecating the pure imagination by letting flights of poetic fancy degenerate into intentional decadence and triviality. But he finds desperate clutching at “things as they are” equally fruitless: “endless struggle with fact” is the poet’s inevitable lot. From this ambivalence springs a whole world of grammatical and syntactic innovation, from his ambiguous use of tense to the welter of qualifications that seem to thwart every affirmative declaration. An unsurpassed classic in the canon of Stevens criticism, On Extended Wings gives us the full sweep his of his oeuvre—from the somber to the whimsical, from high stoic elegy to grotesque comedy—as no one but the brilliant Helen Vendler can.

“A great achievement, the work of an author with an almost devout passion for good poems.”—Frank Kermode, New Republic“Criticism of the Sonnets, and by extension, critical accounts of poetry, will never be the same again.”—Tom Paulin, London Review of BooksThe definitive guide to Shakespeare’s Sonnets from the most accomplished critic of our time.More than four centuries after its initial publication, William Shakespeare’s Sonnets is still very much a living text. Despite all the regalia of its Elizabethan English, despite its baroque grammatical dislocations, Shakespeare’s major work of lyric poetry remains an inexhaustible source of literary wonder. In detailed commentaries on each of the 154 sonnets, Helen Vendler offers a lucid analysis of the verse stylings that we have come to call “Shakespearean.” The supreme accomplishment of these fourteen-line poems, Vendler demonstrates, lies not in their often-conventional themes and images—love and death, roses and thorns, summer’s heat and winter’s cold—nor in some hidden, deeper meaning, but in the seemingly effortless virtuosity of their arrangements. Shakespeare’s sly subversions, his boundless capacity for formal invention, and his uncanny ability to breathe life into even the most commonplace metaphors betray a poetic imagination that has never yet found its equal.Presented alongside both the original and the modernized texts, Vendler’s commentaries not only illuminate the sheer abundance of Shakespeare’s rhetorical strategies and his dynamic use of the sonnet form; they also reveal the sharp satire and scandalous irreverence that he directs toward everything from traditional sexual mores to Petrarchan views of love. Above all, Vendler provides an unparalleled view of a poetic mind at work, both Shakespeare’s and her own.

“Vendler sparkles.”—Irvin Ehrenpreis, New York Review of BooksAmerica’s foremost critic savors the poetry that made—and remade—our twentieth-century canon.The American poet Randall Jarrell once defined the ideal critic as “an extremely good reader—one who has learned to show to others what he saw in what he read.” By this measure, Helen Vendler is the best of her generation. Never doctrinaire or merely academic, she is an evangelist for poetic truth, guiding readers along the tracks of her own authoritative readings to disclose the interplay of form, feeling, and perception that defines each poet’s idiosyncratic vision of the world.A compilation of essays and reviews written for the New York Times Book Review and other outlets, Part of Nature, Part of Us is a dazzling retrospective of the authors who defined midcentury American poetry. The work collected here, originally published in the late 1960s and 1970s, marks the first time that canonical modern poets like T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Sylvia Plath could be judged from a critical distance. Reviewing more recent poets—including Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich—Vendler also gives readers a chance to share in the “freshness of [her] first impressions.” Throughout, she is unforgiving but never unfair. She exults those who, like Lowell, show an essential fidelity to perception, who “say what happened” without stumbling into a mass of clichés. But she is unsparing with those who come to distrust their own emotions and retreat into clinical facticity, like the later Moore. Unflinching, engrossing, and frequently poetic in its own right, Part of Nature, Part of Us confirms Vendler’s unmatched ability to pinpoint great poets’ value as thinkers, as artists, and, finally, as humans.

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. Taken together, they serve as a reminder that if the arts and the patina of culture they cast over the world were deleted, we would, in Wallace Stevens’s memorable formulation, inhabit “a geography of the dead.” These essays also remind us that without the enthusiasm, critiques, and books of each century’s scholars, there would be imperfect perpetuation and transmission of culture.All of the modern poets who have long preoccupied Vendler—Wallace Stevens, Seamus Heaney, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham—are fully represented, as well as others, including Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Amy Clampitt, James Merrill, A. R. Ammons, and Mark Ford. And Vendler reaches back into the poetic tradition, tracing the influence of Keats, Yeats, Whitman, T. S. Eliot, and others in the work of today’s poets. As ever, her readings help to clarify the imaginative novelty of poems, giving us a rich sense not only of their formal aspects but also of the passions underlying their linguistic and structural invention. The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar is an eloquent plea for the centrality, both in humanistic study and modern culture, of poetry’s beautiful, subversive, sustaining, and demanding legacy.

“Vendler again demonstrates—if proof were needed—why she is the finest poetry reviewer in the country.”—Boston GlobeThe renowned critic of Stevens, Keats, and Herbert turns an incisive gaze to her contemporaries, from Louise Glück to Rita Dove.Lyric poetry, says the incomparable Helen Vendler, is defined by immediacy. If the novel aspires to represent life in all its complexity, with characters woven into their manifold historical and sociological contexts, lyric captures the human being in the here and now: as a fragment, an eruption, or a “set of warring passions independent of time and space.” Fiction constructs selfhood, but poetry gives us the soul. Drawing its title from a poem by Jorie Graham, Soul Says collects twenty-one of Vendler’s best essays on the force, beauty, and formal intricacies of late-twentieth-century verse. Whether meditating on Graham’s roving cinematography of the mind, anatomizing the inversions of classical elegy in Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish,” or exploring Charles Simic’s sinister landscapes, Vendler makes difficult poetry accessible and helps readers appreciate the depth and richness of even the simplest texts. Through her perceptive eyes we see how lyric poetry, pulsing with musicality, uses arrangement, pacing, and metaphor to illuminate the hidden corners of inner life. Inner life cannot be entirely disentangled from the history: Rita Dove cannot write as if she were unencumbered by her life as a Black woman in America any more than Seamus Heaney can avoid his experience as a Northern Irishman who lived through the Troubles. But Vendler’s painstaking attention to form—Dove’s angular stanzas, Heaney’s organicism—brilliantly reveals how such great poets exceed the sum of their biographical parts. To read their poetry is to see their lives transfigured, and, in the process, to reconsider our own.

“More than any other single critic, Vendler has shown people how to read Stevens not as a philosopher...but as a passionate and often disappointed human being.”—Stephanie Burt, The Wallace Stevens JournalA giant of modern poetry finds his greatest reader and fiercest advocate in the peerless Helen Vendler.Wallace Stevens is often considered a cerebral, abstract poet. Alternating between ornamental flourish and philosophical contemplation, his work can seem impenetrable to casual readers. When a bewildered acquaintance once asked him to explain a poem, Stevens elliptically replied, “I don’t think you’d understand this unless you wrote it.” And yet, as Helen Vendler shows, there is so much more to Stevens than dexterous wordplay or oblique cogitations on the relationship between reality and imagination. In a meticulous reading of his shorter poems—“The Idea of Order at Key West,” “The Snow Man,” and “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” among others—Vendler excavates the depth of human feeling beneath his rarefied surfaces. Vendler’s Stevens is, above all, a poet of desire and its disillusions. His choices of words, fastidious as they are, mark his attempt to find a form adequate to his over-acute experience of ordinary life events: the failure of a marriage, the death of a neighbor, or a simple walk through his Connecticut neighborhood. Beyond sensual desire, his most profound yearning is to capture in poetry what his nerves cannot help but register, to encapsulate a world that has “stopped revolving except in crystal.” Compiled from Vendler’s 1982 lectures at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Words Chosen Out of Desire showcases a leading critic at the peak of her powers, one whose masterful reconstructions played no small part in cementing Stevens’s place in the canon of literary modernism.

“One of [Vendler’s] finest books, an impressive summation of a long, distinguished career.”—Charles Simic, New York Review of BooksA Times Higher Education Book of the Week.A lively collection of the great critic’s later work showcases her unswerving and deeply personal dedication to good poetry. 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. Taken together, they serve as a reminder that if the arts and the patina of culture they cast over the world were deleted, we would, in Wallace Stevens’s memorable formulation, inhabit “a geography of the dead.” These essays also remind us that without the enthusiasm, critiques, and books of each century’s scholars, there would be imperfect perpetuation and transmission of culture.All of the modern poets who have long preoccupied Vendler—Wallace Stevens, Seamus Heaney, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham—are fully represented, as well as others, including Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Amy Clampitt, James Merrill, A. R. Ammons, and Mark Ford. And Vendler reaches back into the poetic tradition, tracing the influence of Keats, Yeats, Whitman, T. S. Eliot, and others in the work of today’s poets. As ever, her readings help to clarify the imaginative novelty of poems, giving us a rich sense not only of their formal aspects but also of the passions underlying their linguistic and structural invention. The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar is an eloquent plea for the centrality, both in humanistic study and modern culture, of poetry’s beautiful, subversive, sustaining, and demanding legacy.

When a poet addresses a living person--whether friend or enemy, lover or sister--we recognize the expression of intimacy. But what impels poets to leap across time and space to speak to invisible listeners, seeking an ideal intimacy--George Herbert with God, Walt Whitman with a reader in the future, John Ashbery with the Renaissance painter Francesco Parmigianino? In Invisible Listeners, Helen Vendler argues that such poets must invent the language that will enact, on the page, an intimacy they lack in life. Through brilliantly insightful and gracefully written readings of these three great poets over three different centuries, Vendler maps out their relationships with their chosen listeners. For his part, Herbert revises the usual "vertical" address to God in favor of a "horizontal" one-addressing God as a friend. Whitman hovers in a sometimes erotic, sometimes quasi-religious language in conceiving the democratic camerado, who will, following Whitman's example, find his true self. And yet the camerado will be replaced, in Whitman's verse, by the ultimate invisible listener, Death.Ashbery, seeking a fellow artist who believes that art always distorts what it represents, finds he must travel to the remote past. In tones both tender and skeptical he addresses Parmigianino, whose extraordinary self-portrait in a convex mirror furnishes the poet with both a theory and a precedent for his own inventions. By creating the forms and speech of ideal intimacy, these poets set forth the possibility of a more complete and satisfactory human interchange--an ethics of relation that is uncoerced, understanding, and free.

In Last Looks, Last Books, the eminent critic Helen 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 alike. 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. In The Rock, Wallace Stevens writes simultaneous narratives of winter and spring; in Ariel, Sylvia Plath sustains melodrama in cool formality; and in Day by Day, Robert Lowell subtracts from plenitude. In Geography III, Elizabeth Bishop is both caught and freed, while James Merrill, in A Scattering of Salts, creates a series of self-portraits as he dies, representing himself by such things as a Christmas tree, human tissue on a laboratory slide, and the evening/morning star. The solution for one poet will not serve for another; each must invent a bridge from an old style to a new one. Casting a last look at life as they contemplate death, these modern writers enrich the resources of lyric poetry.