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.
To know the poetry of our time, to look through its lenses and filters, is to see our lives illuminated. In these eloquent essays on recent American, British, and Irish poetry, Helen Vendler shows us contemporary life and culture captured in lyric form by some of our most celebrated poets. An incomparable reader of poetry, Vendler explains its power; it is, she says, the voice of the soul rather than the socially marked self speaking directly to us through the stylization of verse. "Soul Says," the title of a poem by Jorie Graham, is thus the name of this collection. In essays on Seamus Heaney, Donald Davie, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Rita Dove, Jorie Graham, and others, Vendler makes difficult poetry accessible. She reveals the idiosyncratic nature of lyric form, and points out the artistic choices present in even the simplest texts. Vendler examines the use of abstraction in lyric poems; considers what readers seek and receive from verse; describes the role of such stylistic devices as compression, structural dynamics, and syntactic ordering; and renders a wide variety of poetic styles meaningful. Through her perceptive eyes we see how lyric poetry, speaking with natural musicality and rhythm, can by arrangement, pacing, metaphor, and tone create symbol from fact-and fill us with new understanding. In these direct and engaged commentaries, she explores the force, beauty, and intellectual complexity of contemporary lyric verse.
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About Helen Vendler
Reviews for Soul Says
Denis Donoghue
New York Review of Books
[In this] engrossing consideration of lyric form, Vendler again demonstrates
if proof were needed
why she is the finest poetry reviewer in this country...The 32 essays include a brilliant summation of A. R. Ammons' 'Sumerian Vistas' and lively discussions of Donald Davie's 'Collected Poems,' the menacing midnights of Charles Simic...Such are Vendler's felicities
inspiriting enthusiasm for the art and an attendant close reading in which her readers hear the poet's voice afresh.
Robert Taylor
Boston Globe
Helen Vendler's credentials precede her by a length and a half...That a non-poet (and an academic to boot) should wield such influence over American poetry is remarkable...She is at her best when discussing individual poems or passages, especially in the cases of a sonnet by Seamus Heaney, when she performs a brilliant analysis of the relationship of rhyme to reason, and in several sections of Ashbery's 'Flow Chart'...She believes in a common reader and wants to elucidate the difficulties of contemporary poetry.
R. S. Gwynn
Los Angeles Times Book Review
If there is one commentator on contemporary poetry whose reviews bear gathering and reprinting, it is Helen Vendler...Vendler's readings help us to hear, and to discern, the sounds of the soul speaking.
John Boening
World Literature Today
The English reader wanting to know more about [Rita] Dove and other recent American writers will find Vendler's enthusiasm infectious and her acceptance of the poetic art in its own terms helpful. As well as the essays on Ginsberg and Dove I found the work on Adrienne Rich, Jorie Graham and Seamus Heaney particularly valuable.
STAND Magazine
[Vendler] discusses the lyric poetry of 23 contemporary poets, mostly American, including Allen Ginsberg, Rita Dove, James Merrill, and Dave Smith, giving particular attention to Seamus Heaney and Jorie Graham. In analyzing individual poems, Vendler describes the stylistic choices the poet made and how the completed poem reveals the inner self, or 'soul,' of the poet...Anyone interested in contemporary poetry can learn from her insights.
Library Journal
Vendler's New Yorker reviews of contemporary poetry, collected here, are revelatory of her critical stance. She does not look for content, she says in her introduction, but for felicity of language. A poem, she argues, rises beyond the occasion that created it. She is interested, then, in poems that define a human voice and emotion...One of our most accessible critics, Vendler is fluent, impassioned, and immensely learned.
Patricia Monaghan
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