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...
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 t...
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...
Poetry has often been considered an irrational genre, more expressive than logical, more meditative than given to coherent argument. And yet, in ea...
After more than a century of study, we know more about Keats than we do about most writers of the past, but we still cannot frilly grasp the magical processes by which he created some of the most celebrated poems in all of English literature. This volume, containing 140 photographs of Keats's own manuscripts, offers the most concrete evidence we have of the way in which his thoughts and feelings were transmuted into art.
The rough first drafts in particular are frill of information about what occurred, if not in Keats's mind, at least on paper when he had pen in hand: the headlong...
After more than a century of study, we know more about Keats than we do about most writers of the past, but we still cannot frilly grasp the magica...
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...
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 ...
This book explores diverse but complementary interdisciplinary approaches to the poetics, intertexts, and influence of the work of C.P. Cavafy (Konstantinos Kavafis), one of the most important 20th-century European poets.
This book explores diverse but complementary interdisciplinary approaches to the poetics, intertexts, and influence of the work of C.P. Cavafy (Konsta...
