Synopses & Reviews
Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem "Among School Children". View her insightful and passionate analysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course.
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.
Review
Part of Nature, Part of Us is a book that asks to be reread until it is completely possessed--like a poem. It is significant not only for what Helen Vendler finds in poetry, but for what she brings to it; what she sees in what she reads and what she shows to us is a function of who she is. In all that she writes it is manifest that Helen Vendler reads new poems with knowledge and intelligence and passion and wit and warmth; she comes out to greet them. Because of that, she herself becomes a writer to whom one can return for a sense of life. Irvin Ehrenpreis - New York Review of Books
Review
Vendler exhibits in abundance the qualities our poets long for, virtues that make the essays and reviews here collected useful to everybody concerned with the nation's culture. High among these virtues is the fullness of Vendler's sympathy with the poets whose work she examines, but even prior to that gift there is her point of view. William H. Pritchard - New Republic
Review
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. Anatole Broyard
Review
Helen Vendler is the best poetry reviewer in America. Her virtues are a rigorous attending to verbal structure and texture; the ability to quote appositely and economically; a sure though not a too-exclusive taste; above all, the ability to do the poem one better by putting into words the relevant responses we might have had if we'd been smarter and more feeling...In her brilliant fusion of reviewing and criticism [she] is the legitimate successor to P. R. Blackmur and Randall Jarrell. New York Times
Synopsis
Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem "Among School Children". View her insightful and passionateanalysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course.
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
1981 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
About the Author
Helen Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.
Harvard University
Table of Contents
Foreword
1. Wallace Stevens
The False and True Sublime
Souvenirs and Prophecies
Stevens and Keats's "To Autumn"
Apollo's Harsher Songs
2. Marianne Moore
3. T. S. Eliot
The Waste Land
4. Robert Penn Warren
Audubon: A Vision
5. W.H. Auden
City Without Walls
6. Elizabeth Bishop
Domestication, Domesticity, and the Otherworldly
7. Randall Jarrell
The Complete Poems
The Third Book of Criticism
8. John Berryman
Dream Songs
9. Robert Lowell
A Difficult Grandeur
"Ulysses, Circe, Penelope"
Day by Day
Pudding Stone
Last Days and Last Poems
Howard Nemerov
Collected Poems
Frank O'Hara
The Virtue of the Alterable
Allen Ginsberg
Planet News, 1961-1967
The Fall of America
James Merrill
Braving the Elements
Divine Comedies
Mirabell: Books of Number
W.S. Merwin
The Miner's Pale Children
Adrienne Rich
Diving into the Wreck
Of Woman Born
Sylvia Plath
Crossing the Water
Charles Wright
The Transcendent "I"
Dave Smith
"Oh I Admire and Sorrow"
Louise Glück
Broadsides
Good Black Poems, One by One
Ammons, Berryman, Cummings
Eight Poets
Ten Poets
Books Discussed