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Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill
Helen Vendler
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Description for Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill
Hardback. 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. This title focuses on the books: "The Rock", "Ariel", "Day by Day", "Geography III" and "A Scattering of Salts". Series: The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts. Num Pages: 168 pages. BIC Classification: 1KBB; 2AB; DSBH; DSC. Category: (G) General (US: Trade); (P) Professional & Vocational; (U) Tertiary Education (US: College). Dimension: 221 x 148 x 18. Weight in Grams: 332.
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.
Product Details
Publisher
Princeton University Press
Number of pages
168
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2010
Series
The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts
Condition
New
Weight
331g
Number of Pages
168
Place of Publication
New Jersey, United States
ISBN
9780691145341
SKU
V9780691145341
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-15
About Helen Vendler
Helen Vendler is the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University. Her many books include "Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery "(Princeton), as well as studies of Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats, Stevens, and Heaney. She is a frequent reviewer for the "New Republic", the "New York Review of Books", and other publications.
Reviews for Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill
One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2011 "Close reading of poems, especially for nonacademic audiences, is hard to find. This makes Helen Vendler's Last Looks, Last Books an attractive proposition. Vendler, long a tastemaker equally respected inside and outside the academy, wants to find out how her subjects 'do justice to both the looming presence of death and the unabated vitality of spirit.'"
Daisy Fried, New York Times Book Review "[A] book that needs to be read and heeded."
Peter Brooks, New York Review of Books "Helen Vendler is our great biographer of the poem... Her lucid, plain-spoken narratives make the poem seem as engrossing as a 'life of the poet' tale."
David Gewanter, Times Higher Education "Vendler convincingly demonstrates how this liminal moment demanded that each poet render a new style in his or her verse. By illuminating the varied and fluid poetic equilibrium between life and death in her precise, nuanced readings, Vendler shapes the reader's own last look at a major vein of American poetry."
Choice "[A] sumptuous banquet."
John Cunningham, Rain Taxi Review of Books "Vendler's insightful critical study is essential for lovers of these American poets... Vendler makes an especially important case for Lowell ... and thus provides readers a new means of appreciating these late poems."
Stephan Delbos, Prague Post "Last Looks, Last Books is a valuable contribution to the understanding of the five poets' aesthetics and can thus be useful for both scholars and students as a source of new insights on these oeuvres, as well as for those interested in the interaction of death and artistic creation."
Boglarka Kiss, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies
Daisy Fried, New York Times Book Review "[A] book that needs to be read and heeded."
Peter Brooks, New York Review of Books "Helen Vendler is our great biographer of the poem... Her lucid, plain-spoken narratives make the poem seem as engrossing as a 'life of the poet' tale."
David Gewanter, Times Higher Education "Vendler convincingly demonstrates how this liminal moment demanded that each poet render a new style in his or her verse. By illuminating the varied and fluid poetic equilibrium between life and death in her precise, nuanced readings, Vendler shapes the reader's own last look at a major vein of American poetry."
Choice "[A] sumptuous banquet."
John Cunningham, Rain Taxi Review of Books "Vendler's insightful critical study is essential for lovers of these American poets... Vendler makes an especially important case for Lowell ... and thus provides readers a new means of appreciating these late poems."
Stephan Delbos, Prague Post "Last Looks, Last Books is a valuable contribution to the understanding of the five poets' aesthetics and can thus be useful for both scholars and students as a source of new insights on these oeuvres, as well as for those interested in the interaction of death and artistic creation."
Boglarka Kiss, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies