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Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays
The great critic's final word on the poems and poets who have meant the most to her
Thirteen brilliant late essays gathered in this farewell book, an unexpected gift to readers
Helen Vendler was our greatest reader of poetry, a scholar who illuminiated its inner mechanisms and emotional roots for a wide audience. The thirteen poignant essays gathered here were all published in the last three years of Vendler's life, in Liberties magazine, and intended as her final book. The author’s preface was completed only three days before her death, at age ninety.
Always attentive to the stylistic and imaginative features of a poem, Vendler addresses the work of a wide range of American, English, and Irish poets, both the canonical and the unexpected,
• Walt Whitman, author of the first PTSD poem
• Sylvia Plath, and the lost poetry of motherhood
• William Cowper, James Merrill, and A. R. Ammons on poetric charm
• Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson, linked by a poetic mystery
• Ocean Vuong and the shaping imagination of poetry today, or a literary • • Wallace Stevens and the enigma of beauty.
In these and other essays Vendler demonstrates once again why the Irish poet Seamus Heaney called her “the best close reader of poems to be found on the literary pages.”
Thirteen brilliant late essays gathered in this farewell book, an unexpected gift to readers
Helen Vendler was our greatest reader of poetry, a scholar who illuminiated its inner mechanisms and emotional roots for a wide audience. The thirteen poignant essays gathered here were all published in the last three years of Vendler's life, in Liberties magazine, and intended as her final book. The author’s preface was completed only three days before her death, at age ninety.
Always attentive to the stylistic and imaginative features of a poem, Vendler addresses the work of a wide range of American, English, and Irish poets, both the canonical and the unexpected,
• Walt Whitman, author of the first PTSD poem
• Sylvia Plath, and the lost poetry of motherhood
• William Cowper, James Merrill, and A. R. Ammons on poetric charm
• Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson, linked by a poetic mystery
• Ocean Vuong and the shaping imagination of poetry today, or a literary • • Wallace Stevens and the enigma of beauty.
In these and other essays Vendler demonstrates once again why the Irish poet Seamus Heaney called her “the best close reader of poems to be found on the literary pages.”
290 pages, Hardcover
Published September 2, 2025
18 people are currently reading
47 people want to read
About the author
Helen Vendler
70 books86 followersHelen Vendler is the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, where she received her PhD in English and American Literature in 1960. Before joining the Harvard faculty, Vendler taught at Cornell, Swarthmore, Haverford, Smith, and Boston University.
Vendler has written books on Yeats, Herbert, Keats, Stevens, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Heaney, and, most recently, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (2007), Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill (2010); Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries’ (2010); and The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry (2015). She also reviews contemporary poetry for the New Republic, London Review of Books, and other journals. She has held fellowships from, among others, the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Woodrow Wilson Center, and National Endowment for the Humanities, and is a member of the American Philosophical Society, American Academy of Arts and Letters, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Swedish Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Modern Language Association, of which she was president in 1980.
Vendler has written books on Yeats, Herbert, Keats, Stevens, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Heaney, and, most recently, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (2007), Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill (2010); Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries’ (2010); and The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry (2015). She also reviews contemporary poetry for the New Republic, London Review of Books, and other journals. She has held fellowships from, among others, the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Woodrow Wilson Center, and National Endowment for the Humanities, and is a member of the American Philosophical Society, American Academy of Arts and Letters, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Swedish Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Modern Language Association, of which she was president in 1980.
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October 16, 2025
Vendler often presents William Butler Yeats as a poet of grand, opposing forces. She admires how his poetry wrestles with the tension between the real, physical world and the world of ideal, timeless beauty. For Vendler, to inhabit a Yeats poem is to feel this struggle personally—the pull between the "passionate, imperfect" human life and the dream of a perfect, unchanging art symbolized by his famous "golden bird." She helps us see that the sentiment in Yeats is not just grand, but deeply human and conflicted.
When writing about John Donne, Vendler highlights his unique intellectual passion. The sentiment she uncovers is not simple romance, but a complex fusion of thought and feeling. To inhabit a Donne poem, like "The Flea" or "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," is to follow a "wire-drawn" argument that uses surprising metaphors and logic to explore love, faith, and connection. Vendler shows us that the feeling in Donne is earned through rigorous thinking, making the emotional payoff all the more powerful.
Of Emily Dickinson, Vendler often expresses a sense of awe at her radical and compressed genius. The sentiment in Dickinson’s poetry is one of intense, often paradoxical, inner experience. Vendler teaches us to inhabit Dickinson’s dashes and unique capitalizations as moments of breathless thought and fierce observation. She reveals a poet who finds the cosmic in the small—a buzzing fly, a slant of light—and whose feelings about death, nature, and the soul are rendered with shattering originality and precision.
When writing about John Donne, Vendler highlights his unique intellectual passion. The sentiment she uncovers is not simple romance, but a complex fusion of thought and feeling. To inhabit a Donne poem, like "The Flea" or "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," is to follow a "wire-drawn" argument that uses surprising metaphors and logic to explore love, faith, and connection. Vendler shows us that the feeling in Donne is earned through rigorous thinking, making the emotional payoff all the more powerful.
Of Emily Dickinson, Vendler often expresses a sense of awe at her radical and compressed genius. The sentiment in Dickinson’s poetry is one of intense, often paradoxical, inner experience. Vendler teaches us to inhabit Dickinson’s dashes and unique capitalizations as moments of breathless thought and fierce observation. She reveals a poet who finds the cosmic in the small—a buzzing fly, a slant of light—and whose feelings about death, nature, and the soul are rendered with shattering originality and precision.
Displaying 1 of 1 review