Eliot's major work, "The Wasteland", was controversial when it appeared in 1922. Considered both obscure and radical, it utilizes a combination of modern slang and ancient myth, arcane literary allusion and jazzy modernity. Eliot also included helpful but pedantic footnotes. However, the poem is lyrical and hypnotic, and its collage-like mode is, ...
A complete facsimile edition of Shakespeare's sonnets, with a commentary on each work, arranged by the celebrated scholar and professor of English at Harvard University.
In these eloquent essays on recent American, British, and Irish poetry, Helen Vendler shows us contemporary life and culture captured in lyric form by some of our most celebrated poets, including Seamus Heaney, Donald Davie, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Rita Dove, Jorie Graham, and others.
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 ...
When a poet addresses a living person - whether friend or enemy, lover or sister - we recognize the expression of intimacy. But what impels poets to leap across time and space to speak to invisible listeners, seeking an ideal intimacy - George Herbert with God, Walt Whitman with a reader in the future, John Ashbery with the Renaissance painter ...
Poetry has often been considered an irrational genre, more expressive than logical, more meditative than given to coherent argument. And yet, in each of the four very different poets she considers here, Helen Vendler reveals a style of thinking in operation. With customary lucidity and spirit, she traces through these poets' lines to find evidence ...
Style is the material body of lyric poetry, Helen Vendler suggests. To cast off an earlier style is to do an act of violence to the self. Why might a poet do this, adopting a sharply different form? In this exploration of three kinds of break in poetic style, Vendler clarifies the essential connection between style and substance in poetry. Opening ...
The fundamental difference between rhetoric and poetry, according to Yeats, is that 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 Helen Vendler's Our Secret Discipline begins. Through exquisite attention to outer and inner forms, ...
Helen Vendler objects to the New Historicist and poststructuralist critics who overlook the aesthetics of poetry in favor of an emphasis on its politics. Using as examples one poem by each of four writers (Milton, Keats, Eliot, and Plath), Vendler provides a close reading, examining structure, imagery, and scansion in order to demonstrate the ...
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. Helen Vendler has become one of our most trusted companions in reading poetry. Among critics today she has an unrivaled ability to show- ...
Though Wallace Stevens' shorter poems are perhaps his best known, his longer poems, Helen Hennessy Vendler suggests in this book, deserve equal fame and equal consideration. Stevens' central theme--the worth of the imagination--remained with him all his life, and Mrs. Vendler therefore proposes that his development as a poet can best be seen, not ...
Helen Vendler widens her exploration of lyric poetry with a new assessment of the six great odes of John Keats and in the process gives us, implicitly, a reading of Keats's whole career.
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. How does a poet repeatedly make art over a lifetime out of an arbitrary assignment of fate? By asking this question of the work of four ...
This volume, containing 140 photographs of Keats's own manuscripts, offers the most concrete evidence we have of the way in which his thoughts and feelings were transmuted into art.
Vendler traces the events of Heaney's career in seven chapters, each of which covers one of the poet's main themes, and provides close readings of many of his important poems.
This book challenges the very possibility of a scientific approach to the problems of consciousness and freedom, and opposes many popular, recent theories such as behaviouralism, identity theory, and functionalism.
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