Soul Says: On Recent Poetry

by Helen Vendler

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.

Genres: Poetry

284 pages, Paperback

First published March 31, 1995

About the author

Helen 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.

Reviews

[Streator Johnson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have alwasy been fascinated wtih the idea of poetry. It seems like such a noble thing to use words and allusion to paint a picture of feelings and emotions. How cool is that? Unfortunately, the reality is that I rarely feel like understand what the poet is trying to do when I delve into poems. As a result, this may be the first book on my list that comes in at less than three stars. And one of the few I didn't finish. Ms. Vendler was recommended to me by a friend as someone who said she was good at explaining how to understand poetry. But, as I wrote back to her:

"When I sit down to read it, I feel like I am wearing some sort of special helmet that does not allow the ideas Ms. Vendler is trying to get across to enter my brain. In my mind's eye, I see them floating up from the book toward my head and going "PING" as they hit my brain helmet and bouncing off into outer space to be viewed with confusion by the various alien races inhabiting our universe. I must say it does make me feel a little stupid. But really, what can you do with a paragraph like this:

'Modern dismantlers of the notion of selfhood have pointed out that each of us is less a "unified self" than a site traversed by the discourse of which we have been exposed. The amalgam of multiple discourse in you "is" you; consciousness is coextensive with the languages in which it is conceived. The free-will or constructivist version of this idea gives you some agency in picking and choosing your discourses, whereas the determinist version finds you helplessly passive in your absorption of the discourse of your cultural and environmental moment."

I have no idea what that means and it did nothing to make me feel closer to understanding poetry as a whole. And I am all the sorrier for tht fact. This book is probably right a lot of peoples' alley. I am, unfortunatelyn not one of them.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

She is interested in poetry and right there earns my undying love. I wish she'd write a few essays while drunk. I wish she'd drop acid. This woman was told she wasn't welcome at Harvard grad school because she's a woman. Pioneer. She needs someone to guide her to noncanonical (sp?) poets. I blogged about her at My 3,000 Loving Arms: http://my3000lovingarms.blogspot.com/...