Background
Vendler, Helen Hennessy was born on April 30, 1933 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. Daughter of George and Helen (Conway) Hennessy.
( Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on ...)
Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem "Among School Children". View her insightful and passionate analysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course. The poets nearest to us in time often seem the most remote and difficult. Helen Vendler closes the distance. She keeps the poet in view not only as thinker and artist, but as a man or woman whose humanity never disappears in her analysis. With her penetrating critical gift, Vendler assesses American poets from T. S. Eliot to Charles Wright.
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( Helen Vendler widens her exploration of lyric poetry w...)
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.
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( Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on ...)
Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem "Among School Children". View her insightful and passionate analysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course. Helen Vendler has become one of our most trusted companions in reading poetry. Among critics today she has an unrivaled ability to show--lucidly and invitingly--just what a poem does. Insight and wit distinguish these essays, in which Vendler elucidates the function of criticism as well as different critical methods and styles. Poets commented on range from Seamus Heaney and Czeslaw Milosz to Silvia Plath, James Merrill, and Amy Clampitt.
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( Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on ...)
Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem "Among School Children". View her insightful and passionate analysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course. How does a poet repeatedly make art over a lifetime out of an arbitrary assignment of fate? By asking this question of the work of four American poets--two men of the postwar generation, two young women writing today--Helen Vendler suggests a fruitful way of looking at a poet's career and a new way of understanding poetic strategies as both mastery of forms and forms of mastery. Fate hands every poet certain unavoidable "givens." Of the poets Vendler studies, Robert Lowell sprang from a family famous in American and especially New England history; John Berryman found himself an alcoholic manic-depressive; Rita Dove was born black; Jorie Graham grew up trilingual, with three words for every object. In Vendler's readings, we see how these poets return again and again to the problems set out by their givens, and how each invents complex ways, both thematic and formal, of making poetry out of fate. Compelling for its insights into the work of four notable poets, this book by a leading critic of poetry is also invaluable for what it has to tell us about the poetic process--about how art copes with the obdurate givens of life, and about the conflict in art between the whim of fate and the artist's will to choose.
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( Style is the material body of lyric poetry, Helen Vend...)
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. Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem "Among School Children". View her insightful and passionate analysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course.
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( Many students today are puzzled by the meaning and purp...)
Many students today are puzzled by the meaning and purpose of poetry. Poems, Poets, Poetry demystifies the form and introduces students to its artistry and pleasures, using methods that Helen Vendler has successfully used herself over her long, celebrated career. Guided by Vendler’s erudite yet down-to-earth approach, students at all levels can benefit from her authoritative instruction. Her blend of new and canonical poets includes the broadest selection of new and multi-racial poets offered by any introductory text. Comprehensive and astute, this text engages students in effective ways of reading — and taking delight in — poetry.
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( To find a personal style is, for a writer, to become a...)
To find a personal style is, for a writer, to become adult; and to write one's first "perfect" poem--a poem that wholly and successfully embodies that style--is to come of age as a poet. By looking at the precedents, circumstances, and artistry of the first perfect poems composed by John Milton, John Keats, T. S. Eliot, and Sylvia Plath, Coming of Age as a Poet offers rare insight into this mysterious process, and into the indispensable period of learning and experimentation that precedes such poetic achievement. Milton's L'Allegro, Keats's On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and Plath's The Colossus are the poems that Helen Vendler considers, exploring each as an accession to poetic confidence, mastery, and maturity. In meticulous and sympathetic readings of the poems, and with reference to earlier youthful compositions, she delineates the context and the terms of each poet's self-discovery--and illuminates the private, intense, and ultimately heroic effort and endurance that precede the creation of any memorable poem. With characteristic precision, authority, and grace, Vendler helps us to appreciate anew the conception and the practice of poetry, and to observe at first hand the living organism that breathes through the words of a great poem.
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(By looking at the precedents, circumstances and artistry ...)
By looking at the precedents, circumstances and artistry of the first perfect poems composed by John Milton, John Keats, T.S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath, this title offers insight into the mysterious process of coming of age as a poet.
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( Poetry has often been considered an irrational genre, ...)
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; although they may prefer different means, she argues, all poets of any value are thinkers. The four poets taken up in this volume--Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and William Butler Yeats--come from three centuries and three nations, and their styles of thinking are characteristically idiosyncratic. Vendler shows 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 spirit, Vendler traces through these poets' lines to find evidence of thought in lyric, the silent stylistic measures representing changes of mind, the condensed power of poetic thinking. Her work argues against the reduction of poetry to its (frequently well-worn) themes and demonstrates, instead, that there is always in admirable poetry a strenuous process of thinking, evident in an evolving style--however ancient the theme--that is powerful and original.
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( When a poet addresses a living person--whether friend o...)
When a poet addresses a living person--whether friend or enemy, lover or sister--we recognize the expression of intimacy. But what impels poets to leap across time and space to speak to invisible listeners, seeking an ideal intimacy--George Herbert with God, Walt Whitman with a reader in the future, John Ashbery with the Renaissance painter Francesco Parmigianino? In Invisible Listeners, Helen Vendler argues that such poets must invent the language that will enact, on the page, an intimacy they lack in life. Through brilliantly insightful and gracefully written readings of these three great poets over three different centuries, Vendler maps out their relationships with their chosen listeners. For his part, Herbert revises the usual "vertical" address to God in favor of a "horizontal" one-addressing God as a friend. Whitman hovers in a sometimes erotic, sometimes quasi-religious language in conceiving the democratic camerado, who will, following Whitman's example, find his true self. And yet the camerado will be replaced, in Whitman's verse, by the ultimate invisible listener, Death. Ashbery, seeking a fellow artist who believes that art always distorts what it represents, finds he must travel to the remote past. In tones both tender and skeptical he addresses Parmigianino, whose extraordinary self-portrait in a convex mirror furnishes the poet with both a theory and a precedent for his own inventions. By creating the forms and speech of ideal intimacy, these poets set forth the possibility of a more complete and satisfactory human interchange--an ethics of relation that is uncoerced, understanding, and free.
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( Listen to a short interview with Helen Vendler Host: C...)
Listen to a short interview with Helen Vendler Host: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane 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 attention to outer and inner forms, Vendler explores the most inventive reaches of the poet's mind. This book is a space-clearing gesture, an attempt to write about lyric forms in Yeats in unprecedented and comprehensive ways. The secret discipline of the poet is his vigilant attention to forms--whether generic, structural, or metrical. Yeats explores the potential of such forms to give shape and local habitation to volatile thoughts and feelings. Helen Vendler remains focused on questions of singular importance: Why did Yeats cast his poems into the widely differing forms they ultimately took? Can we understand Yeats's poetry better if we pay attention to inner and outer lyric form? Chapters of the book take up many Yeatsian ventures, such as the sonnet, the lyric sequence, paired poems, blank verse, and others. With elegance and precision, Vendler offers brilliant insights into the creative process and speculates on Yeats's aims as he writes and rewrites some of the most famous poems in modern literature.
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( In Last Looks, Last Books, the eminent critic Helen Ven...)
In Last Looks, Last Books, the eminent critic Helen Vendler examines the ways in which five great modern American poets, writing their final books, try to find a style that does justice to life and death alike. With traditional religious consolations no longer available to them, these poets must invent new ways to express the crisis of death, as well as the paradoxical coexistence of a declining body and an undiminished consciousness. In The Rock, Wallace Stevens writes simultaneous narratives of winter and spring; in Ariel, Sylvia Plath sustains melodrama in cool formality; and in Day by Day, Robert Lowell subtracts from plenitude. In Geography III, Elizabeth Bishop is both caught and freed, while James Merrill, in A Scattering of Salts, creates a series of self-portraits as he dies, representing himself by such things as a Christmas tree, human tissue on a laboratory slide, and the evening/morning star. The solution for one poet will not serve for another; each must invent a bridge from an old style to a new one. Casting a last look at life as they contemplate death, these modern writers enrich the resources of lyric poetry.
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(Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the...)
Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem "Among School Children". View her insightful and passionate analysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course. Poet and critic are well met, as one of our best writers on poetry takes up one of the world's great poets. Where other books on the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney have dwelt chiefly on the biographical, geographical, and political aspects of his writing, this book looks squarely and deeply at Heaney's poetry as art. A reading of the poet's development over the past thirty years, Seamus Heaney tells a story of poetic inventiveness, of ongoing experimentation in form and expression. It is an inspired and nuanced portrait of an Irish poet of public as well as private life, whose work has given voice to his troubled times. With characteristic discernment and eloquence, Helen Vendler traces Heaney's invention as it evolves from his beginnings in Death of a Naturalist (1966) through his most recent volume, The Spirit Level (1996). In sections entitled "Second Thoughts," she considers an often neglected but crucial part of Heaney's evolving talent: self-revision. Here we see how later poems return to the themes or genres of the earlier volumes, and reconceive them in light of the poet's later attitudes or techniques. Vendler surveys all of Heaney's efforts in the classical forms--genre scene, elegy, sonnet, parable, confessional poem, poem of perception--and brings to light his aesthetic and moral attitudes. Seamus Heaney's development as a poet is inextricably connected to the violent struggle that has racked Northern Ireland. Vendler shows how, from one volume to the next, Heaney has maintained vigilant attention toward finding a language for his time--"symbols adequate for our predicament," as he has said. The worldwide response to those discovered symbols suggests that their relevance extends far beyond this moment.
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(Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the...)
Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem "Among School Children." View her insightful and passionate analysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course. How does a poet repeatedly make art over a lifetime out of an arbitrary assignment of fate? By asking this question of the work of four American poets--two men of the postwar generation, two youn...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FGVY48C/?tag=2022091-20
literature educator poetry critic
Vendler, Helen Hennessy was born on April 30, 1933 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. Daughter of George and Helen (Conway) Hennessy.
AB, Emmanuel College, 1954. Doctor of Philosophy, Harvard University, 1960. Doctor of Philosophy (honorary), University Oslo, 1981.
Doctor of Letters (honorary), Smith College, 1980. Doctor of Letters (honorary), Kenyon College, 1982. Doctor of Letters (honorary), University Hartford, 1985.
Doctor of Letters (honorary), Union College, 1986. Doctor of Letters (honorary), Columbia University, 1987. Doctor of Letters (honorary), Washington University, 1991.
Doctor of Letters (honorary), Marlboro College, 1989. Doctor of Letters (honorary), Yale University, 2000. Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), Fitchburg State University, 1990.
Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), Dartmouth College, 1992. Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), University Massachusetts, 1992. Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), Bates College, 1992.
Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), University Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 1992. Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, 1993. Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), University Cambridge, 1997.
Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), National University, Ireland, 1998. Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), Wabash College, 1998. Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), University Mass, Dartmouth, 2000.
Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), Yale University, 2000. Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), University Aberdeen, 2000. Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), Tufts University, 2001.
Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), Amherst College, 2002. Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), Colby College, 2003. Doctor of Humane Letters, Bard College, 2005.
Doctor of Humane Letters, Willamette University, 2008.
Instructor Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 1960-1963. Lecturer Swarthmore (Pennsylvania) College and Haverford (Pennsylvania) College, 1963-1964. Assistant professor Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, 1964-1966.
Associate professor Boston University, 1966-1968, professor, 1968-1985. Fulbright lecturer University Bordeaux, France, 1968-1969. Visiting professor Harvard University, 1981-1985, Kenan professor, since 1985, Porter University professor, since 1990, associate academy dean, 1987-1992, senior fellow Harvard Society Fellows, 1981-1993.
Poetry critic New Yorker, 1978-1999. Member educational advisory board Guggenheim Foundation, 1991-1901, Pulitzer Prize Board, 1991-1999. Mellon lecturer National Gallery, 2006.
( Listen to a short interview with Helen Vendler Host: C...)
( In Last Looks, Last Books, the eminent critic Helen Ven...)
( Helen Vendler widens her exploration of lyric poetry w...)
( To find a personal style is, for a writer, to become a...)
( Poetry has often been considered an irrational genre, ...)
(Discusses the difficult style of Wallace Stevens, looks a...)
(By looking at the precedents, circumstances and artistry ...)
( When a poet addresses a living person--whether friend o...)
(The Poetry of George Herbert is an elixir, from the Willi...)
( Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on ...)
( Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on ...)
( Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on ...)
(Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the...)
(Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the...)
( Many students today are puzzled by the meaning and purp...)
( Style is the material body of lyric poetry, Helen Vend...)
(GREAT BOOK!)
Author: Yeats's Vision and the Later Plays, 1963, On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems, 1969, The Poetry of George Herbert, 1975, Part of Nature, Part of Us, 1980, The Odes of John Keats, 1983, Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire, 1984. Editor: Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry, 1985, Voices and Visions: The Poet in America, 1987, The Music of What Happens, 1988, Soul Says, 1995, The Given and the Made, 1995, The Breaking of Style, 1995, Poems, Poets, Poetry, 1995, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, 1997, Seamus Heaney, 1998, Coming of Age as a Poet, 2003, Poets Thinking, 2004, Invisible Listeners, 2005, Our Secret Discipline, 2007, Last Looks, Last Books, 2010, Dickinson: Selected Poems with Commentries, 2010.
Board directors National Humanities Center, 1989—1993. Member Modern Language Association (executive council 1972-1975, president 1980), American Academy of Arts and Letters (board member since 2007), English Institute (trustee 1977-1985), American Academy Arts and Sciences (vice president 1992-1995), Norwegian Academy Letters and Science, American Philosophical Society (Jefferson medal 2000), Phi Beta Kappa.
1 son, David.