About the Book
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 American poets--two men of the postwar generation, two young women writing today--Helen Vendler suggests a fruitful way of looking at a poet's career and a new way of understanding poetic strategies as both mastery of forms and forms of mastery. Fate hands every poet certain unavoidable givens. Of the poets Vendler studies, Robert Lowell sprang from a family famous in American and especially New England history; John Berryman found himself an alcoholic manic-depressive; Rita Dove was born black; Jorie Graham grew up trilingual, with three words for every object. In Vendler's readings, we see how these poets return again and again to the problems set out by their givens, and how each invents complex ways, both thematic and formal, of making poetry out of fate. Compelling for its insights into the work of four notable poets, this book by a leading critic of poetry is also invaluable for what it has to tell us about the poetic process--about how art copes with the obdurate givens of life, and about the conflict in art between the whim of fate and the artist's will to choose.
Review :
[review of "Soul Says," "The Given and the Made," and "The Breaking of Style"] Helen Vendler is justly admired as the author of critical studies of George Herbert, Keats, W. B. Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. Her current project is a study of Shakespeare's sonnets. She is also the most influential reviewer of contemporary poetry in English: her reviews of new books of poetry appear frequently and forcefully in "The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Parnassus," and other journals...[H]er gifts are so immense...The new books have a number of such [acute] analyses, continuously alert to the detail of the poems...One of the pleasures of reading Vendler's criticism is that of seeing a poet's achievement lavishly appreciated...The most valuable chapters in the three new books are those in which Vendler leads us through difficult poems...After [she does so], the poem is still to be read, and read again, word by word, line, sequence, image cut into image. We have to get back from the discursive model, which Vendler so clearly describes, to the local movement and texture of the poem. But after Vendler's commentary we are in a much better position to do so. I cannot think of a better justification for a critic's work. -- Denis Donoghue "New York Review of Books"
Vendler is a critic readers of poetry, inside the academy and out, should take seriously...She writes less as a scholar (though her learning is prodigious) than as one impelled by the special pleasure she finds in poems to trace each instance of that pleasure to its source...While ["The Given and the Made" and "The Breaking of Style"] offer complex, sometimes difficult interpretations of work that is itself often difficult, they hew close to the primary experiences of wonder and conviction that is poetry's special power to evoke. Her prose is...lucid and elegant...[In "The Breaking of Style," ] the chapter on Hopkins is a tour de force, the most concise and helpful account I have seen of the dense, jarring, strangely musical meter the Victorian Jesuit called 'sprung rhythm'...Vendler's argument, in "The Given and the Made," is that poetry is a special way of confronting, and symbolically resolving, the hard facts of life. And poetry, which has for so long seemed to be approaching an ultimate marginality, surely needs defenders like Vendler, so committed to protecting its singularity as an art form...These [are] illuminating books. -- A. O. Scott "Nation"
[review of Soul Says, The Given and the Made, and The Breaking of Style ] Helen Vendler is justly admired as the author of critical studies of George Herbert, Keats, W. B. Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. Her current project is a study of Shakespeare's sonnets. She is also the most influential reviewer of contemporary poetry in English: her reviews of new books of poetry appear frequently and forcefully in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Parnassus, and other journals...[H]er gifts are so immense...The new books have a number of such [acute] analyses, continuously alert to the detail of the poems...One of the pleasures of reading Vendler's criticism is that of seeing a poet's achievement lavishly appreciated...The most valuable chapters in the three new books are those in which Vendler leads us through difficult poems...After [she does so], the poem is still to be read, and read again, word by word, line, sequence, image cut into image. We have to get back from the discursive model, which Vendler so clearly describes, to the local movement and texture of the poem. But after Vendler's commentary we are in a much better position to do so. I cannot think of a better justification for a critic's work.
[A] stimulating meditation on four significant American poets by an indispensable critic...Here [Vendler offers] four cool-headed, serenely selfless essays that originated as the T. S. Eliot Lectures given at the University of Kent. Her subject is the characteristic obsessions guiding the work of Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Rita Dove, and Jorie Graham, each of whom, in Vendler's view, has transformed obsession into art...The particular virtue of Vendler is to write with the authority of a scholar and the alertness of a contemporary about a form of art too often deluged by arcana, professional jargon, literary back-patting, or neglect...A literary challenge and a companion for the common reader, whoever that may be, of 20th-century poetry.
In the collections of essays The Breaking of Style and The Given and the Made Helen Vendler...firmly positions herself as one of our most authoritative voices on modern and contemporary poetry. Already an authority on Keats and Stevens among others, Vendler moved several years ago into the realm of contemporary poetry, where she has quickly established herself as a major critic. Vendler has always been a skilled practitioner of close reading, but in the essays of these two volumes she becomes an articulate apologist for the intensive attention to details of style and form that has come to be identified with New Criticism. Eschewing the current hegemony of theory in literary scholarship, Vendler makes the case in these essays that not only is there still a place for an exclusive engagement with the details of textual analysis, but to fail to address the details of a poem's making is to ignore its physical presence.
fail to address the details of a poem's making is to ignore its physical presence.
for the common reader, whoever that may be, of 20th-century poetry.
marginality, surely needs defenders like Vendler, so committed to protecting its singularity as an art form...These [are] illuminating books.
model, which Vendler so clearly describes, to the local movement and texture of the poem. But after Vendler's commentary we are in a much better position to do so. I cannot think of a better justification for a critic's work.
Ýreview of "Soul Says," "The Given and the Made," and "The Breaking of Style"¨ Helen Vendler is justly admired as the author of critical studies of George Herbert, Keats, W. B. Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. Her current project is a study of Shakespeare's sonnets. She is also the most influential reviewer of contemporary poetry in English: her reviews of new books of poetry appear frequently and forcefully in "The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Parnassus," and other journals...ÝH¨er gifts are so immense...The new books have a number of such Ýacute¨ analyses, continuously alert to the detail of the poems...One of the pleasures of reading Vendler's criticism is that of seeing a poet's achievement lavishly appreciated...The most valuable chapters in the three new books are those in which Vendler leads us through difficult poems...After Ýshe does so¨, the poem is still to be read, and read again, word by word, line, sequence, image cut into image. We have to get back from the discursive model, which Vendler so clearly describes, to the local movement and texture of the poem. But after Vendler's commentary we are in a much better position to do so. I cannot think of a better justification for a critic's work. -- Denis Donoghue "New York Review of Books"
ÝA¨ stimulating meditation on four significant American poets by an indispensable critic...Here ÝVendler offers¨ four cool-headed, serenely selfless essays that originated as the T. S. Eliot Lectures given at the University of Kent. Her subject is the characteristic obsessions guiding the work of Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Rita Dove, and Jorie Graham, each of whom, in Vendler's view, has transformed obsession into art...The particular virtue of Vendler is to write with the authority of a scholar and the alertness of a contemporary about a form of art too often deluged by arcana, professional jargon, literary back-patting, or neglect...A literary challenge and a companion for the common reader, whoever that may be, of 20th-century poetry.
In the collections of essays "The Breaking of Style" and "The Given and the Made" Helen Vendler...firmly positions herself as one of our most authoritative voices on modern and contemporary poetry. Already an authority on Keats and Stevens among others, Vendler moved several years ago into the realm of contemporary poetry, where she has quickly established herself as a major critic. Vendler has always been a skilled practitioner of close reading, but in the essays of these two volumes she becomes an articulate apologist for the intensive attention to details of style and form that has come to be identified with New Criticism. Eschewing the current hegemony of theory in literary scholarship, Vendler makes the case in these essays that not only is there still a place for an exclusive engagement with the details of textual analysis, but to fail to address the details of a poem's making is to ignore its physical presence. -- Mary Kaiser "World Literature Today"
