Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology

I know I would've loved this book and I'll find one somewhere else. This arrived with a filthy cover that I cleaned up with a wet paper towel with lysol on it. I can't believe they sent it out that way, but even worse, and the reason I threw it out, it had little piles of black mold on several pages. Disgusting. Not wanting to have it around or touch it again, I tossed it. Won't do business here again. (Paid thirty something dollars for it.)

Helen Vendler knows poetry from the outside in and the inside out; this book will not only clue you in to how poetry works, why people write poetry, what makes a good poem, but will bring together the intrapsychic, social, political, and historical links that make poetry survive after a number of millennia. If you're a student who is assigned a book of poetry as an introduction, and it isn't this one, ask for a change. I don't know if the author is a poet, but she's the only critic and this seems to be the only textbook that seems to answer the question, "Why do people write poetry in the first place, and why do they feel so compelled to do so.

no sweat! This review refers to the 1997 first edition with the bright red ribbon on the cover, instead of the 2002 Second Edition with the purple ribbon. I wish someone could tell us the difference between the two editions, besides price! This really is a poetry anthology, like for a first or second level English Lit undergraduate course, yet it is so much more for being from Professor Helen Vendler, our most brilliant and discrete and careful critic and teacher of poetry, EVER! Professor Vendler, who brought into even our baby reach The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Professor Vendler, who reveals for us the mysteries, the machinery and the might of Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form. Professor Helen Vendler, of Harvard, who shows us what it is to read Seamus Heaney and why we must, who awakens to us our hunger to seek all that we can. Vendler, who gives back to us our own America in Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets. All that you find of Professor Vendler is gold, and a book for the long journey. Here we have the treasure chest in one. The greatest regret in this book is that after over three hundred LARGE (9x6) pages of excellent commentary bringing us by the little hand through every aspect of English language lyric poetry, through each line of samples, she leaves us on our own, with three hundred pages of densely packed poetry arranged alphabetically by author's last name, more than a hundred poets with over 250 poems, from Shakespeare, Blake, Coleridge and John Clare through Emily Dickenson, Poe, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens. We see Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath, TS Eliot and of course, Mr. Yeats, and so many more it would be unfair to list only these few, yet impossible to list them all here. We have here the full (later) version od Colerdge's Rime. Of the Beats we have only two from Ginsberg: the Sunflower Sutra and one from the mid-Fifties entitled America, almost a shard of Walt Whitman, of whom we have much. We read Wordsworth and Williams and Wilbur. Dylan Thomas and Tennyson embrace, but I must stop listing here, unfair to those several unlisted. Five appendices explore Prosody, Grammar, Speech Arts, Rhetorical Devices (my favorite) and Lyric subgenres. Indices of terms, first lines, authors and titles, as well as chronology fill out this comprehensive text. But the gold, the bright and brilliant gold, is that First Part, in which Professor Vendler takes us so kindly, so gently, ever so slowly through all aspects of lyric poetry. In the first of the two sections preceding the Table of Contents, Prof. Vendler explains Part One thusly: 'This book offers ways to read and understand poems with the pleasure they deserve. Its nine chapters in Part I approach the poem from various directions, in the conviction that any artwork invites consideration from different perspectives. Chapter 1, "the Poem as Life" uses several short poems to show how a poetic utterance sprin

Ms. Vendler is by far the most exciting and intelligent poetry critic of today. Her understanding of poets, particularly of their mature works, is thorough, thrilling, and refreshingly insightful. Read anything she's written on Robert Lowell, Wallace Stevens, Seamus Heaney, and Czeslaw Milosz and you will find, through her clarity, new reasons to fall in love with these magnificent poets. I highly recommend two other books by Ms. Vendler: Part of Nature, Part of Us & The Music of What Happens. Though I am no longer a student, I continue to read these books to shreds. She does for poetry what Ms. Ingrid Rowland does for Art History. Experience Ms. Vendler for yourself, and while you're at it, get an online subscription of NYRB and you can read all the articles she's written for this brilliant magazine.

There may be something ominous to potential, non-student readers in the fact that this is a "textbook". What a bizarre thing! "Text" book. How is it different from a book? Well, it's a form of book that is meant to be taken very, very seriously because it is "required reading" for a required course and because it will help the worthy achieve mightily in the "standardized testing" they will have to take to prove themselves. Like most books, a "text" book has words in it, i.e. a text. We assumed that. The tautologous term "text" seems to have been added by some utterly pretentious, youth- despising pedant who wanted to quell and trample upon whatever inner happiness a kid may have felt at the propect of learning something new. A textbook about poetry is perhaps an oxymoron. Is there a standardized test for stirring of the soul or the soaring heart? This is an excellent "book" book on poetry and art in general. In fact, it's one of my favorite books, and I've read alot. As soon as I finished it, I started at the beginning again. Except for the proposed questions for discussion or homework, there are very few "textbook" concessions. There is no talking down. It is intelligent and honest from beginning to end. In fact, having known many college age students in recent years nearly all of whom had the attention spans of mosquitoes, I wondered how far any would get in this book. It's too intelligent to serve as a modern textbook really. But for people who love poetry, have hope invested in poetry, it's great. If you want to understand the basic elements of poetry, how it works, what it does that is diffeent from other arts, there can be no finer work. Just as Browning read Johnson's Dictionary in preparation for a career as a poet, so I would imagine young poets and poetry lovers will in future read Professor Vendler. Helen Vendler has an extraordinary ability to see clearly the basis of a poem, working back through the words, rhythms, intonations,and references to the pre-verbal experience the poet had that required expression. She has an intuitive intelligence that is oddly contagious. Sensing her remarkable ability to listen, one's own power to listen is enhanced: I too can puzzle back to the heart of this song and this experience. Our personal experience has a deep commonality. In other words, you can, after a while, learn the art of "close reading". It's a how-to book. And it's quite exciting, in a way, like suddenly being able to ride a bike on your own. Finally, of course, it is a book about life. Poetry only exists as a communicative tool for interpreting the raw material, precious raw material, of life. One says Well, I'm alive so what do I need it for? Well, because we're not alive, we're semi-alive, brutally familiar with a very small part of life. So this being a book about great poetry addresses the great questions of life itself.

A few quick notes: HV has put together a superb anthology/teaching tool here. She's learned and yet accessible. Includes classics and new poems. Also includes margin notes defining odd words used by Keats and others. Full of definitions and examples for poetry terms. Comprehensive and insightful!!! Great fun to browse through or to deeply study.