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Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets
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.
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.
390 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
2 people are currently reading
71 people want to read
About the author
Helen Vendler
71 books87 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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Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 18, 2023
"There is no light for us at the end of the light.
No one redeems the grass our shadows lie on.
Each night, in its handful of sleep, the mimosa blooms.
Each night the future forgives.
Inside of us, albino roots are starting to take hold.- Charles Wright
Helen Vendler is a poetry reviewer who assumes her reader has a sophisticated knowledge of both content and structure of modern day poets. This particular book of reviews, published in 1980, is dated.
Nevertheless, her work always leads me to discover a new to me poet.
Always worth the time.
No one redeems the grass our shadows lie on.
Each night, in its handful of sleep, the mimosa blooms.
Each night the future forgives.
Inside of us, albino roots are starting to take hold.- Charles Wright
Helen Vendler is a poetry reviewer who assumes her reader has a sophisticated knowledge of both content and structure of modern day poets. This particular book of reviews, published in 1980, is dated.
Nevertheless, her work always leads me to discover a new to me poet.
Always worth the time.
Displaying 1 of 1 review