Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets

“Vendler sparkles.”
—Irvin Ehrenpreis, New York Review of Books

America’s foremost critic savors the poetry that made—and remade—our twentieth-century canon.

The American poet Randall Jarrell once defined the ideal critic as “an extremely good reader—one who has learned to show to others what he saw in what he read.” By this measure, Helen Vendler is the best of her generation. Never doctrinaire or merely academic, she is an evangelist for poetic truth, guiding readers along the tracks of her ...