Harper American Literature, Native Son (Textbook and Paper Packaged Together)

Minter, David

McQuade, Donald

Vendler, Helen Hennessy

KAPLAN, Justin

Atwan,Robert

Tichi, Cecelia

Banta, Martha

Stepto, Robert

Harpercollins College Div

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.

The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham (The Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Harvard University Press

Helen Vendler widens her exploration of lyric poetry with a new assessment of the six great odes of John Keats and in the process gives us, implicitly, a reading of Keats’s whole career. She proposes that these poems, usually read separately, are imperfectly seen unless seen together―that they form a sequence in which Keats pursued a strict and profound inquiry into questions of language, philosophy, and aesthetics.
Vendler describes a Keats far more intellectually intent on creating an aesthetic, and on investigating poetic means, than we have yet seen, a Keats inquiring into the proper objects of worship for man, the process of soul making, the female Muse, the function of aesthetic reverie, and the ontological nature of the work of art. We see him questioning the admissibility of ancient mythology in a post Enlightenment art, the hierarchy of the arts, the role of the passions in art, and the rival claims of abstraction and representation. In formal terms, he investigates in the odes the appropriateness of various lyric structures. And in debating the value to poetry of the languages of personification, mythology, philosophical discourse, and trompe l’oeil description, Keats more and more clearly distinguishes the social role of lyric from those of painting, philosophy, or myth.
Like Vendler’s previous work on Yeats, Stevens, and Herbert, this finely conceived volume suggests that lyric poetry is best understood when many forms of inquiry―thematic, linguistic, historical, psychological, and structural―are brought to bear on it at once.

The Odes of John Keats (Belknap Press)

Belknap Press

Though Wallace Stevens’ shorter poems are perhaps his best known, his longer poems, Helen Hennessy Vendler suggests in this book, deserve equal fame and equal consideration. Stevens’ central themeâthe worth of the imaginationâremained with him all his life, and Mrs. Vendler therefore proposes that his development as a poet can best be seen, not in descriptionâwhich must be repetitiveâof the abstract bases of his work, but rather in a view of his changing styles. 
 The author presents here a chronological account of fourteen longer poems that span a thirty-year period, showing, through Stevens’ experiments in genre, diction, syntax, voice, imagery, and meter, the inventive variety of Stevens’ work in long forms, and providing at the same time a coherent reading of these difficult poems. She concludes, “Stevens was engaged in constant experimentation all his life in an attempt to find the appropriate vehicle for his expansive consciousness; he found it in his later long poems, which surpass in value the rest of his work.”

On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens Longer Poems

Poetry

see notes for publisher info

Yeats's Vision and the Later Plays

Discusses the difficult style of Wallace Stevens, looks at his major themes, and analyzes, in detail, several of his poems.

Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire (Hodges Lectures)

University of Tennessee Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Vendler, Helen Hennessy. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Vendler, Helen Hennessy