Items related to The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition
Synopsis
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.
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About the Author
Helen Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.
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The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition (First Edition)
Published by
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1995
ISBN 10: 0674354311
ISBN 13: 9780674354319
Used
Hardcover
First Edition
Seller: Dan Pope Books, West Hartford, CT, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Hardcover. Condition: As New. Dust Jacket Condition: As New. 1st Edition. First printing. A very fine (as-new) copy in a very fine jacket (as-new, but for some fading on spine, as pictured). A clean, tight copy in an unclipped jacket. Comes with archival-quality jacket protector. Although not marked in any such way, this book came from the library of poet and literary critic J.D. McClatchy, from his estate in Stonington, Connecticut. REVIEW copy, with review slip laid in. Seller Inventory # McClatchy-403
Quantity: 1 available