Part of Nature, Part of Us : Modern American Poets

Helen Vendler

ISBN 10: 0674654765 / ISBN 13: 9780674654761

Published by Harvard University Press Jan 1980, 1980

About this Item

Neuware - 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.The poets nearest to us in time often seem the most remote and difficult. Helen Vendler closes the distance. She keeps the poet in view not only as thinker and artist, but as a man or woman whose humanity never disappears in her analysis. With her penetrating critical gift, Vendler assesses American poets from T. S. Eliot to Charles Wright.

Seller Inventory # 9780674654761

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Part of Nature, Part of Us : Modern American Poets
• Publisher: Harvard University Press Jan 1980
• Publication Date: 1980
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674654765
• ISBN 13: 9780674654761
• Binding: Taschenbuch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 229W x 146H x 25D millimeters 229 millimeters width by 146 millimeters height by 25 millimeters depth
• Weight: 499 grams

About this title

Synopsis

“Vendler sparkles.”
―Irvin Ehrenpreis, New York Review of Books

America’s foremost critic savors the poetry that made―and remade―our twentieth-century canon.

The American poet Randall Jarrell once defined the ideal critic as “an extremely good reader―one who has learned to show to others what he saw in what he read.” By this measure, Helen Vendler is the best of her generation. Never doctrinaire or merely academic, she is an evangelist for poetic truth, guiding readers along the tracks of her own authoritative readings to disclose the interplay of form, feeling, and perception that defines each poet’s idiosyncratic vision of the world.

A compilation of essays and reviews written for the New York Times Book Review and other outlets, Part of Nature, Part of Us is a dazzling retrospective of the authors who defined midcentury American poetry. The work collected here, originally published in the late 1960s and 1970s, marks the first time that canonical modern poets like T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Sylvia Plath could be judged from a critical distance. Reviewing more recent poets―including Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich―Vendler also gives readers a chance to share in the “freshness of [her] first impressions.” Throughout, she is unforgiving but never unfair. She exults those who, like Lowell, show an essential fidelity to perception, who “say what happened” without stumbling into a mass of clichés. But she is unsparing with those who come to distrust their own emotions and retreat into clinical facticity, like the later Moore.

Unflinching, engrossing, and frequently poetic in its own right, Part of Nature, Part of Us confirms Vendler’s unmatched ability to pinpoint great poets’ value as thinkers, as artists, and, finally, as humans.

About the Author

Helen Vendler (1933–2024) was a leading poetry critic and the author of nineteen books on poets from William Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney. A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, she contributed regularly to the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, and the New Republic. She was the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.