The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar : Essays on Poets and Poetry / Helen Vendler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Vendler, Helen, 1933-2024, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Poetry.

Poetics.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (457 p.)

Edition:

Pilot project. eBook available to selected US libraries only

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2015]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

A Times Higher Education Book of the Week One of our foremost commentators on poetry examines the work of a broad range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English, Irish, and American poets. The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar gathers two decades’ worth of Helen Vendler’s essays, book reviews, and occasional prose—including the 2004 Jefferson Lecture—in a single volume. “It’s one of [Vendler’s] finest books, an impressive summation of a long, distinguished career in which she revisits many of the poets she has venerated over a lifetime and written about previously. Reading it, one can feel her happiness in doing what she loves best. There is scarcely a page in the book where there isn’t a fresh insight about a poet or poetry.” —Charles Simic, New York Review of Books “Vendler has done perhaps more than any other living critic to shape—I might almost say ‘create’—our understanding of poetry in English.” —Joel Brouwer, New York Times Book Review “Poems are artifacts and [Vendler] shows us, often thrillingly, how those poems she considers the best specimens are made…A reader feels that she has thoroughly absorbed her subjects and conveys her understanding with candor, clarity, wit.” —John Greening, Times Literary Supplement

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction

1 The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar.How the Arts Help Us to Live

2. Fin-de-Siècle Lyric. W. B. Yeats and Jorie Graham

3. The Unweary Blues. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes

4. The Nothing That Is. Chickamauga, by Charles Wright

5. American X-Rays. Forty Years of Allen Ginsberg’s Poetry

6. The Waste Land. Fragments and Montage

7. The Snow Poems and Garbage. Episodes in A. R. Ammons’s Poetics

8. All Her Nomads. Collected Poems, by Amy Clampitt

9. Seamus Heaney and the Oresteia. “Mycenae Lookout” and the Usefulness of Tradition

10. Melville. The Lyric of History

11. Lowell’s Persistence. The Forms Depression Makes

12. Wallace Stevens. Hypotheses and Contradictions, Dedicated to Paul Alpers

13. Ardor and Artifice. Merrill’s Mozartian Touch

14. The Titles. A. R. Ammons, 1926–2001

15. Poetry and the Mediation of Value. Whitman on Lincoln

16. “Long Pig”. The Interconnection of the Exotic, the Dead, and the Fantastic in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop

17. Stevens and Keats’s “To Autumn”. Reworking the Past

18. “The Circulation of Small Largenesses”. Mark Ford and John Ashbery

19. Wallace Stevens. Memory, Dead and Alive

20. Jorie Graham. The Moment of Excess

21. Attention, Shoppers. Where Shall I Wander, by John Ashbery

22. Seamus Heaney’s “Sweeney Redivivus”. Its Plot and Its Poems

23. The Democratic Eye. A Worldly Country, by John Ashbery

24. Losing the Marbles: James Merrill on Greece

25. Mark Ford: Intriguing, Funny, Prophetic

26. Notes from the Trepidarium. Stay, Illusion, by Lucie Brock-Broido

27. Pried Open for All the World to See. Berryman the Poet

Notes

Credits

Ac know ledg ments

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 27. Mrz 2018)

ISBN:

9780674425743

067442574X

9780674425729

0674425723

OCLC:

1029810332