Books by Helen Vendler

In this book Vendler brings her remarkable skills to bear on a number of Stevens's short poems. She shows us that this most intellectual of poets is in fact the most personal of poets; that his words are not devoted to epistemological questions alone but are also "words chosen out of desire."

Though Wallace Stevens' shorter poems are perhaps his best known, his longer poems, Vendler suggests in this book, deserve equal fame and equal consideration. She proposes that Stevens 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.

Insight and wit distinguish these essays, in which Vendler elucidates the function of criticism as well as different critical methods and styles. Poets commented on range from Seamus Heaney and Czeslaw Milosz to Silvia Plath, James Merrill, and Amy Clampitt.

Vendler's masterful study of changes in style yields a new view of the interplay of moral, emotional, and intellectual forces in a poet's work. 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.

One of our foremost commentators examines the work of a broad range of English, Irish, and American poets. Helen Vendler's essays, book reviews, and occasional prose from the past two decades, taken together, are an eloquent plea for the centrality--in humanistic study and modern culture--of poetry's subversive, sustaining, and demanding legacy.

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.

In these essays on American, British, and Irish poetry, Vendler shows us contemporary life and culture captured in lyric form by some of our most celebrated poets. Vendler explains the power of poetry; it is, she says, the voice of the soul, rather than the socially marked self, speaking directly to us through the stylization of verse.

According to Yeats, 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 Vendler begins in Our Secret Discipline. Through exquisite attention to outer and inner forms, Vendler explores the most inventive reaches of the poet's mind.

The poets nearest to us in time often seem the most remote and difficult. Helen Vendler closes the distance. She keeps the poet in view not only as thinker and artist, but as a man or woman whose humanity never disappears in her analysis. With her penetrating critical gift, Vendler assesses American poets from T. S. Eliot to Charles Wright.

Vendler offers a new assessment of the six great odes of Keats and in the process gives us, implicitly, a reading of Keats's whole career. She proposes that these poems are imperfectly seen unless seen together-that they form a sequence in which Keats pursued a strict and profound inquiry into questions of language, philosophy, and aesthetics.