Style is the material body of lyric poetry. To cast off an earlier style is to commit an act of violence against the creative self. Why do poets so often make these dramatic breaks? In her 1994 Richard Ellman Lectures, Helen Vendler investigates poets'...
The fundamental difference between rhetoric and poetry, according to Yeats, is that rhetoric is the expression of oneâs quarrels with others while poetry is the expression (and sometimes the resolution) of oneâs quarrel...
Helen Vendler, widely regarded as our most accomplished interpreter of poetry, here serves as an incomparable guide to some of the best-loved poems in the English language.
"More than any other single critic, Vendler has shown people how to read Stevens not as a philosopher..but as a passionate and often disappointed human being."
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. She proposes that these poems, usually read separately, are imperfec...