Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats

by Helen Vendler

Overview

“In reminding us to look at and listen to the actual words on the page...Vendler invites us to expand our response to experience, and to find in it—if we are both attentive and lucky—beauty and solace.”
—Christopher Benfey, New York Review of Books

The grand dame of poetic criticism defends lyric poetry as a product of fierce intelligence as much as creative inspiration.

Poetry has often been considered an irrational genre, more expressive than logical, more meditative than given to coherent argument. And yet, in each of the four very different poets she considers here, Helen Vendler reveals a style of thinking in operation. All poets of any value are thinkers, she argues, even if no two think alike.

The four poets taken up in this volume—Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and William Butler Yeats—come from three different centuries and three different nations, and their styles of thinking are characteristically idiosyncratic. Vendler gives us Pope performing as a satiric miniaturizer, remaking in verse the form of the essay; Whitman writing as a poet of repetitive insistence for whom thinking must be followed by rethinking; Dickinson experimenting with plot to characterize life’s unfolding; and Yeats thinking in images, using montage in lieu of argument.

With customary lucidity and vigor, Vendler pores over these poets’ lines to find evidence of thought in lyric, from subtle stylistic shifts that embody changes of mind to images that serve as condensations of concepts and emotions. Far more than in (frequently well-worn) themes, she demonstrates that poetic genius resides in open-ended contemplation: the interminable work of recalling, evaluating, and structuring experience in verse. Never linear or merely propositional, poems show us the human mind in process, inviting us to participate in experiential discoveries as they unfold.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674021105
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	04/15/2006
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Helen Vendler (1933–2024) was a leading poetry critic and the author of nineteen books on poets from William Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney. A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, she contributed regularly to the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, and the New Republic. She was the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.

Editorial Reviews

One of the most distinguished critics of poetry in the English-speaking world...Vendler engages in close reading to find a poem's distinctiveness of language and literary form...Vendler is really trying to enlarge our idea of what poetry can be...In reminding us to look at and listen to the actual words on the page, and not to leap too soon to some hackneyed idea that they recall, Vendler invites us to expand our own response to experience.
— Christopher Benfey

New York Review of Books

In her challenging and entertaining new book, Poets Thinking, Helen Vendler argues that poetry in all its manifestations, however ostensibly irrational, is a mode of thinking that commands not just our aesthetic appreciation but also our intellectual respect...Vendler is a wonderful elucidator of individual poems. Nobody writes more insightfully about a poem's stylistic armature, and the emotional and intellectual purposes that armature serves. And by examining the distinctive strategies of thinking in the work of such radically different poets as Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, and Yeats, Vendler makes visible aspects of style and language that other critics simply haven't seen.
— Alan Shapiro

Harvard Magazine

Vendler's close readings lay bare the process of poetic reflection: Poets Thinking is about how rather than what poets think, about the act of the mind rather than any 'embalmed thought' that readers might want to extract from verse...Vendler is exceptionally skilled at demonstrating that poetry offers us pictures of the mind at work rather than settled axioms to take away...[Poets Thinking] has a good deal to offer in the way of thought-provoking and sometimes dazzling readings of British and American poetry.
— Fiona Green

Times Literary Supplement

Helen Vendler's Poets Thinking is lucid, accessible, and inspired...Vendler's own voice is that rare academic combination of expertise and accommodation...Her arguments provide ample explanation and exempla for the lay reader while provoking the academic to revisit old assumptions. She is at ease with the broad sweep of American and English poetry and with the critical methods of the last half-century. Her conclusions seem remarkably self-evident, a voice of trustworthiness and reason that encourages us to lean closer, to listen carefully.
— Lynnell Edwards

Georgia Review