Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form

by Helen Vendler

The fundamental difference between rhetoric and poetry, according to Yeats, is that rhetoric is the expression of one’s quarrels with others while poetry is the expression (and sometimes the resolution) of one’s quarrel with oneself. This is where Helen Vendler’s Our Secret Discipline begins. Through exquisite attention to outer and inner forms, Vendler explores the most inventive reaches of the poet’s mind. This book is a space-clearing gesture, an attempt to write about lyric forms in Yeats in unprecedented and comprehensive ways. The secret discipline of the poet is his vigilant attention to forms―whether generic, structural, or metrical. Yeats explores the potential of such forms to give shape and local habitation to volatile thoughts and feelings.

Helen Vendler remains focused on questions of singular Why did Yeats cast his poems into the widely differing forms they ultimately took? Can we understand Yeats’s poetry better if we pay attention to inner and outer lyric form? Chapters of the book take up many Yeatsian ventures, such as the sonnet, the lyric sequence, paired poems, blank verse, and others. With elegance and precision, Vendler offers brilliant insights into the creative process and speculates on Yeats’s aims as he writes and rewrites some of the most famous poems in modern literature.

Genres: Poetry, Literary Criticism, Criticism

448 pages, Hardcover

First published November 29, 2007

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

[Kevin Fitzpatrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author of such classic volumes such as "The Odes of John Keats" and "The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets," Helen Vendler, A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, is such an author of high repute that one is conditioned to expect elevated levels of erudition and learning whenever one deigns to read one of her books. So it is no surprise (at least on the part of this reader) that her effort on the form of the poems of Irish poet William Butler Yeats ("Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form") also approaches perfection. Consisting of thirteen discrete chapters, each considering one aspect of form in Yeats' oeuvre, this book itself is a work of considerable artistry, for Vendler's prose, as it explores the manifestations of Yeats' artistry in form, approaches levels of exquisite beauty and analytic power that brings skill almost commensurate with the artistry of her subject matter (the poetry of Yeats). Additionally, for this reader at least, who was superficially acquainted with Yeats due to ethnic heritage and vocational exposure, this book also succinctly and comprehensively makes clear the complete genius of Yeats, for this book illustrates the sublime mastery Yeats had in all aspects of his poetry. For Yeats' exploration of differing forms of poetry, as explained by Ms. Vendler, is nothing short of God-like in its sublimity and grace. With the complexity of a Physics problem solved beautifully, combined with the lyricism of the music of the spheres, and underlined by the wisdom of fifty years of observation of all things Irish (and human), Yeats' poetry, its complexity and beauty, is a subject well worth studying, and Vendler's erudite tome is the almost perfect vehicle for its exploration. This work should be read if one desires to truly appreciate the beauty and sophistication of an Irish-bred genius who sung the songs, complex and lyrical, of a nation, and a time, wracked by war and strife, yet which produced works of well-wrought artifice that have outlived the travails of the time, thus achieving a form of permanence, nay immortality.

[Connor · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best explanation of structure's function that I've read.

[Harrison Glaze · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

[Diann Blakely]

This is decidedly not a book in the “____ for Dummies” series. Nor does it function as an introduction to Ireland’s greatest poet of the twentieth century, currently celebrated in a state of the art (complete with digital versions, so that the reader can examine every page of bound manscript books) exhibition at Dublin’s National Library that will come to this country in 2009 if a suitable venue can be found. Vendler, whose status as a close reader is without peer and who has already written extensively on Yeats, this time takes an almost scientific--at one point in her life, she intended to study medicine--approach to how his poems are put together and how that craftsmanship affects our hearts, minds, and souls as we read him.












(originally published in *The Tennesseean*)

[David Anthony Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to take a class taught by Helen Vendler. It would not be an easy A. Instead, it would challenge and open new doors and windows into some of my favorite poets. Vendler is the poet's great reader, one who spends time and effort rereading and rereading again, studying the structure, asking why the poet went this way instead of that. She is a student of form and its revelatory impact on content.

In this book, Vendler makes an intense study of Yeats, form by form, seeking to understand his choices whether conscious or not, explicating the impact of choice on each poem and of the poem on the form. Not an introduction to Yeats but rather a fine advanced study for those who have already spent some time with his poetry. If that's you, then read this book.

[Vasile · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helpful to understand Yeats poems. Easy to read.

[Michael Matejka · Rating 4 out of 5]

A two for one.

Since my primary interest was fiction/prose, I got through my writing programs without gaining much knowledge of the technical or formal aspects of poetry. In fact, I'm not sure I was encouraged to try anything beyond free verse, though of course I was aware of the sonnet, the haiku, etc. I've long considered this a weakness in myself, even though my interest in poetry remains secondary.

Helen Vendler's Our Secret Discipline offers a great review of poetic techniques as featured in the work of William B. Yeats. It deepened my insight into general craft, how over the course of his career Yeats developed and mastered that craft, and how an understanding of that craft provides the reader with a greater appreciation for Yeat's work.

I now know more about both poetry and Yeat's poems.

This work is not intended for the casual reader.