The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham

by Helen Vendler

Style is the material body of lyric poetry, Helen Vendler suggests. To cast off an earlier style is to do an act of violence to the self. Why might a poet do this, adopting a sharply different form? In this exploration of three kinds of break in poetic style, Vendler clarifies the essential connection between style and substance in poetry. Opening fresh perspectives on the work of three very different poets, her masterful study of changes in style yields a new view of the interplay of moral, emotional, and intellectual forces in a poet’s work.

Gerard Manley Hopkins’ invention of sprung rhythm marks a dramatic break with his early style. Rhythm, Vendler shows us, is at the heart of Hopkins’ aesthetic, and sprung rhythm is his symbol for danger, difference, and the shock of the beautiful. In Seamus Heaney’s work, she identifies clear shifts in grammatical “atmosphere” from one poem to the next―from “nounness” to the “betweenness” of an adverbial style―shifts whose moral and political implications come under scrutiny here. And finally Vendler looks at Jorie Graham’s departure from short lines to numbered lines to squared long lines of sentences, marking a move from deliberation to cinematic “freeze-framing to coverage, each with its own meaning in this poet’s career.

Throughout, Vendler reminds us that what distinguishes successful poetry is a mastery of language at all levels―including the rhythmic, the grammatical, and the graphic. A fine study of three poets and a superb exposition of the craft of poetry, The Breaking of Style revives our lapsed sense of what style means.

Genres: Poetry, Criticism, Literary Criticism

112 pages, Paperback

First published December 6, 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

[John Fredrickson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I always learn from Vendler's books, and this one is no different in that regard. In this book, she considers three poets, Hopkins, Heaney and Graham, and discusses changes in the style of their poems. These changes may be reflective of a change in the poet over time, or may reflect a change in strategy from poem to poem (Heaney). I struggled at times to keep up with what Vendler was saying, hence the comparatively low rating compared to other Vendler books.

The good outcome of reading this for me has been that I have always had difficulty reading Hopkins, and the discussion of his sprung rhythm has opened up his poetry for me somewhat. I also have not read any of Heaney or Graham's poetry before, so it is helpful to 'get a peek' into their poetry as well. This is particularly true for Graham - I may seek to find a book of her poetry, as she comes across as interesting.

[scrapespaghetti · Rating 2 out of 5]

Style is the material body of lyric poetry, Hellen Vendler suggests. To cast off an earlier style is to perform an act of violence on the self.


(Introduction)

Robert Lowell complained that pieces of his earlier driven and violent style kept turning up like flotsam and jetsam when he was trying to write the ironic, mild, and distanced lines of Life Studies. The invention of a new phase of style, then, is often less a voluntary act than an involuntary one. One is repelled by one's present body and cannot inhabit it any longer.

Keats, striking out the influence of Milton from Hyperion, declared, with no hyperbole intended, “Life to him would be death to me” {Letters, II, 212). And he wrote himself a new body in The
Fall of Hyperion.

The positive aspect of the breaking of style, when it appears, must, as much as the negative one, have a convergent set of creative causes. “English ought to be kept up,” said Keats (Letters, 11, 167), suggesting that if he did not positively keep it up, English might fade and die, “I
had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm,” Hopkins wrote to Richard Watson Dixon, explaining why the prosody of “The Wreck of the Deutschland” differed so from the
metrics of his early verse (Correspondence, 14).

There must be, in short, espousals as well as rejections in the invention of the new stylistic body, not only when the new body is a permanent one but also when it is provisional, when it is adopted for a single volume or even for a single poem.

[Rita Lei Chen 雷晨 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Surprised by Vendler's scalpel-like dissection. The most touching part comes from the precision of both poetry and commentary.

[Ярослава · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book enough to buy what feels like at least 2/3 of Vendler's backlist, and she is a VERY prolific scholar:) Scholarly, I'm not much of a poetry person, so some part of my love for this book can be accounted for with the shininess of novelty. But I also liked her style: she remains grounded in source texts while not shying away from discussing the broader implications of formal choices, which was very refreshing after a very theory-heavy term.

[Gary McDowell]

Because.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perfectly accurate assessment of the necessary evolutions of personal style.