Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form

“An intellectual feast.”
—John Leonard, Harper’s Magazine

A monumental study reveals the patient and meticulous labor behind the Irish Nobel laureate’s immaculate poetic craft.

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 attentio...