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 Gluck Broadsides Good Black Poems, One by One Ammons, Berryman, Cummings Eight Poets Ten Poets Books Discussed
Helen Vendler (1933–2024) was a leading poetry critic and the author of nineteen books on poets from William Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney. A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, she contributed regularly to the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, and the New Republic. She was the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.
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.
*New York Review of Books*
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.
*New York Times*
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.
*Boston Globe*
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 Republic*
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
