There is no denying Helen Vendler's seriousness, her willingness to
approach modern poetry's mass with a critical density of equal
proportion. Her style and her sympathy are rich, her preferences
plain: for late Stevens ("the elegiac sublime of ruins. . . the
celebratory sublime of inception"), for Robert Lowell ("History and
its companion volumes. . . contain the first legitimate continuance
of Shakespeare's sonnets since Keats. . . the quin essential beauty
of the appalling exactly drawn. . ."). But in these collected
essays (most of which previously appeared in periodicals), her
blindspots also merge. Poetry that does not, in Stevens' phrase,
move from an "ever-early candor to its late plural," that does not
offer as its terminal a metaphysical or contemplative or
philosophical Taj Mahal, that does not enlarge of its own
consummated thought - poetry like this she simply does not see.
When she says that Howard Nemerov's poems rise from contemplation
of "the will's rebellion against necessity, history's repetitions,
the pitfalls of the literary life, and the perpetual discrepancy
between hope and event," she really means it; she believes that
poetry fills eidetic shapes preexistent in the mind of the poet, So
she'll chide Frank O'Hara for resisting abstraction, for never
tying up his poetry with the twine of reflection (yet will call
James Merrill's "espousal of the conversational as the ultimate in
linguistic achievement" a "moral choice, one which locates value in
the human and everyday rather than in the transcendental" - the
difference presumably being that Merrill's "plural" credentials are
more in order than O'Hara's). Past Lowell, Stevens, and Merrill,
then, she is mostly lost. She waves approval toward only the very
safest of the new (the congested, chalky poetry of Dave Smith, the
cloissone-work of Louise Gluck); and when she reviews Black poetry,
you feel she's slumming, over-eager. Her phrase-making can be
sharply satisfying (A. R. Ammons is "like a guitarist presented
every day with a different senorita in the balcony") but, overall,
it seems used as a defensive whip that flicks away the hoi-polloi,
the unwashed who will not summarize, deduce, or walk stately among
the sepulchres of the examined life. The total effect? She makes
poetry - and this is all the more a pity, since she's so energetic
and giving - into an elephant's graveyard. (Kirkus 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.
General
Imprint: |
Harvard University Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
1980 |
First published: |
1980 |
Authors: |
Helen Vendler
|
Dimensions: |
229 x 146 x 23mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback
|
Pages: |
390 |
Edition: |
New Ed |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-674-65476-1 |
Categories: |
Books >
Earth & environment >
The environment >
General
|
LSN: |
0-674-65476-5 |
Barcode: |
9780674654761 |
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