The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry

ISBN: 0674984080

Author: Vendler

Condition: New

One of [Vendlers] finest books, an impressive summation of a long, distinguished career.-Charles Simic, New York Review of BooksA Times Higher Education Book of the Week.A lively collection of the great critics later work showcases her unswerving and deeply personal dedication to good poetry.One of our foremost commentators on poetry examines the work of a broad range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English, Irish, and American poets. The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar gathers two decades worth of Helen Vendlers essays, book reviews, and occasional prose-including the 2004 Jefferson Lecture-in a single volume. Taken together, they serve as a reminder that if the arts and the patina of culture they cast over the world were deleted, we would, in Wallace Stevenss memorable formulation, inhabit a geography of the dead. These essays also remind us that without the enthusiasm, critiques, and books of each centurys scholars, there would be imperfect perpetuation and transmission of culture.All of the modern poets who have long preoccupied Vendler-Wallace Stevens, Seamus Heaney, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham-are fully represented, as well as others, including Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Amy Clampitt, James Merrill, A. R. Ammons, and Mark Ford. And Vendler reaches back into the poetic tradition, tracing the influence of Keats, Yeats, Whitman, T. S. Eliot, and others in the work of todays poets. As ever, her readings help to clarify the imaginative novelty of poems, giving us a rich sense not only of their formal aspects but also of the passions underlying their linguistic and structural invention. The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar is an eloquent plea for the centrality, both in humanistic study and modern culture, of poetrys beautiful, subversive, sustaining, and demanding legacy.