Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
Praise for Helen Vendler:
Helen Vendler puts herself entirely at the service of the poets she is talking about. Although she writes too well to be invisible, she does not compete or pontificate either... What she does is to offer the poetry to you. The New York Times
Review
In this triumphant collection, Vendler reminds us why she is one of the most important living scholars of poetry...This book, with its oceans of depth, reminds us why we need poetry--as well as teachers like Vendler to bring it to transformative life. William H. Pritchard - Boston Globe
Review
The formidable poetry critic Helen Vendler gathers together over two decades of essays, book reviews, and prose examining a broad range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English, Irish, and American poets. Taken together, her writings serve as an eloquent argument for the necessity of poetry both in humanistic study and in modern life. Christine Emba
Review
A new book by Helen Vendler is always occasion for gratitude, since for more than 50 years she has provided us with the most exacting writing about poetry of any American critic...She is at her best in commentaries on Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, and John Berryman...Vendler argues for the centrality of the arts in a humanities curriculum, since their demand for 'subtlety of response' can't be duplicated. Her own essays are a vivid proof of what such response can look like. New Criterion
Review
A generous collection of essays spanning 35 years..., by one of our best critics, is an event worth celebrating...Vendler claims, modestly, that readers including herself will always need a path into some poems and poets, and suggests that the function of criticism is to provide such a path. She does this splendidly, and creating such paths for contemporary poets who have not yet accumulated a body of interpretation for their work is a very special gift...These essays will be a pleasure for readers of poetry and a service to the poets Vendler chooses for her close readings. Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Review
It's one of [Vendler's] finest books, an impressive summation of a long, distinguished career in which she revisits many of the poets she has venerated over a lifetime and written about previously. Reading it, one can feel her happiness in doing what she loves best. There is scarcely a page in the book where there isn't a fresh insight about a poet or poetry. Elizabeth Greene - Times Higher Education
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
In this book, based on unpublished lectures delivered at the University of Cambridge, the late John Hollander explores the poetic lives and afterlives of shadow, focusing on British and American poetry from the Renaissance to the end of the twentieth century. Hollander uncovers the myriad literary identities assumed by shadow—its force as a metaphoric mirror, as material for parable, a form of knowledge, and a mode of vision. He shows us what kind of thinking can be done with and in shadow, and what love of shadow amounts to. In particular, he traces the history of how shadows acquire in poetry a mysterious substance—the paradoxical means through which a thing, by nature secondary and passing, grabs at authority and becomes itself a source of life. In Hollander’s poetic examples, shadow shows itself as a kind of light, clarifying things as much as it darkens them, even as it becomes a name for doubt and the unnamable. Hollander and the poets he discusses give us shadow as companion, comforter, and questioner; creator, stalker, and ghost; witness, destroyer, and double. If the book’s argument suggests at moments an anatomy of melancholy, the shadow here is also an occasion of continuous wonder, an opening to the gifts of time.
About the Author
Helen Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.
Harvard University