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
作者简介
海伦·文德勒,哈佛大学金斯利·波特大学教授。
Helen Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.
目录
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 Artifi ce: 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
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