The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar
Essays on Poets and Poetry
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $35.99
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- $35.99
Publisher Description
A Times Higher Education Book of the Week
One of our foremost commentators on poetry examines the work of a broad range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English, Irish, and American poets. The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar gathers two decades’ worth of Helen Vendler’s essays, book reviews, and occasional prose—including the 2004 Jefferson Lecture—in a single volume.
“It’s one of [Vendler’s] finest books, an impressive summation of a long, distinguished career in which she revisits many of the poets she has venerated over a lifetime and written about previously. Reading it, one can feel her happiness in doing what she loves best. There is scarcely a page in the book where there isn’t a fresh insight about a poet or poetry.”
—Charles Simic, New York Review of Books
“Vendler has done perhaps more than any other living critic to shape—I might almost say ‘create’—our understanding of poetry in English.”
—Joel Brouwer, New York Times Book Review
“Poems are artifacts and [Vendler] shows us, often thrillingly, how those poems she considers the best specimens are made…A reader feels that she has thoroughly absorbed her subjects and conveys her understanding with candor, clarity, wit.”
—John Greening, Times Literary Supplement
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this triumphant collection, Vendler (Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries) reminds us why she is one of the most important living scholars of poetry. Although her renowned work has included several studies of Yeats and painstaking close readings of Shakespeare's sonnets, most of the 27 essays showcased in this book are rooted in American soil. But the geographically grounded collection is anything but constricted: its essays, in their varied approaches, open up America's haunting, startlingly alive poetic landscape. The first entry analyzes the Wallace Stevens poem "Somnabulisma," the imagery of which inspired this book's title, while later essays illuminate key poets like John Ashbery, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop, and Seamus Heaney. The most rewarding selection, however, may be the introduction, in which Vendler turns to her own history and experience as a scholar. Here her writing evinces the same sensitivity and sustained poetic focus that is, as the close readings in her essays show, so critical to her criticism. This book, with its oceans of depth, reminds us why we need poetry as well as teachers like Vendler to bring it to transformative life.
