Soul Says: On Recent Poetry - Softcover

Vendler, Helen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674821475 ISBN 13: 9780674821477

Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 1996

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.

To know the poetry of our time, to look through its lenses and filters, is to see our lives illuminated. 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. An incomparable reader of poetry, Vendler explains its power; it is, she says, the voice of the soul rather than the socially marked self speaking directly to us through the stylization of verse. "Soul Says," the title of a poem by Jorie Graham, is thus the name of this collection. In essays on Seamus Heaney, Donald Davie, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Rita Dove, Jorie Graham, and others, Vendler makes difficult poetry accessible. She reveals the idiosyncratic nature of lyric form, and points out the artistic choices present in even the simplest texts. Vendler examines the use of abstraction in lyric poems; considers what readers seek and receive from verse; describes the role of such stylistic devices as compression, structural dynamics, and syntactic ordering; and renders a wide variety of poetic styles meaningful. Through her perceptive eyes we see how lyric poetry, speaking with natural musicality and rhythm, can by arrangement, pacing, metaphor, and tone create symbol from fact-and fill us with new understanding. In these direct and engaged commentaries, she explores the force, beauty, and intellectual complexity of contemporary lyric verse.

About this title

Review

Helen Vendler, a professor of English at Harvard, comments eloquently on modern American, Irish, and British poets in this collection of critical essays. Seamus Heaney, Allen Ginsberg, Rita Dove, Jorie Graham, Gary Snyder, and others are discussed in prose that rings with insight and clarity. A serious look at serious poets, this collection is thankfully never solemn or stuffy. In her essays, Vendler often provides helpful background information about the various poets she discusses, and this collection can stand as a valuable introduction to some very good writers. Best of all, she knows what she wants to say and she says it well.

From the Back Cover

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0674821475
• ISBN 13: 9780674821477
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 284