Coming of Age as a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath [Hardcover]

Helen Vendler (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0674010248 | ISBN-13: 978-0674010246 | Publication Date: March 13, 2003

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 Chapman's Homer, Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and Plath's The Colossus are the poems that Helen Vendler considers, exploring each as an accession to poetic confidence, mastery, and maturity. In meticulous and sympathetic readings of the poems, and with reference to earlier youthful compositions, she delineates the context and the terms of each poet's self-discovery--and illuminates the private, intense, and ultimately heroic effort and endurance that precede the creation of any memorable poem.

With characteristic precision, authority, and grace, Vendler helps us to appreciate anew the conception and the practice of poetry, and to observe at first hand the living organism that breathes through the words of a great poem.

(20030101)

Editorial Reviews

Review

In Coming of Age as a Poet, Vendler...chooses one breakthrough poem by each of four poets--Milton, Keats, Eliot, and Plath. Through close readings of their structure, imagery, and scansion, she shows how these poems mark each poet's mastery of a unique voice...The clarity and expert analysis of all four poems could engage even a casual reader, while the breadth of scholarship and unique interpretations will appeal to more experienced poetry readers. Vendler's work is highly recommended.
--Vivian Reed (Library Journal 20030330)

Where does a poet's voice come from and of what is it forged? There's a question to bring out bootless reductionism if ever there was one, yet Helen Vendler explores it magnificently in its complexity and nuance in Coming of Age as a Poet.
--Katherine A. Powers (Boston Sunday Globe 20030901)

Reading a Vendler essay is like coming home to the cave; like entering the mind of the poet. In Coming of Age as a Poet, a collection of four essays, Vendler looks at the point in the lives of four poets...when they came into their own maturity as poets, found their discourses, the styles and the voices that would make them immortal...Vendler shows them on their vulnerable ascents to greatness.
--Susan Salter Reynolds (Los Angeles Times Book Review 20031120)

A clear but subtle account of the struggles, the rites of passage, undergone by four poets, while still in their 20s, negotiating with tradition in order to find their style and attain their majority--to become, in fact, major poets...Each chapter becomes a short story, a thrillingly compressed account of the vicissitudes of genius...It is a pleasure to be guided by [Vendler] into the poet's workshop--she is so good at making poetry matter, at opening up the interest of passages one had dully taken for granted.
--Philip Horne (Guardian 20031001)

Though modest in size, Coming of Age contains numerous original insights into the creative process, especially into that formative period in which a poet finds his or her technique, style, and voice.
--D. D. Kummings (Choice 20031221)

Helen Vendler begins her brief study with a persuasive and delightful piece on the young Milton...[She] is brilliant on Keat's comparatively slow but sure practicing on the Petrarchan model...She is equally good, by contrast, on the gradual evolution of Eliot's 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock'...[This book is] full of perceptions and rewards that send one scurrying back to the text.
--John Bayley (New York Review of Books 20040101)

[Vendler's] attention to the psychological and aesthetic unraveling of the poet's calling turns the microscopic into the majestic.
--Jacques Khalip (Boston Review 20040214)

Using Milton, Keats, Eliot and Path as her case studies, Ms. Vendler 'consider[s] the work a young poet has to have done before writing his or her first "perfect poem"--the poem which first wholly succeeds in embodying a coherent personal style.' This is a bold claim and a challenging book, but Ms. Vendler succeeds brilliantly in keeping us hooked. By the end we are better readers.
--Tom Mayo (Dallas Morning News 20050101)

[Vendler] has offered up a brief but profound inspiration to any reader willing to take the time to move slowly, with curiosity and attention, through her investigation of four cases of great poetry.
--Len Edgerly (Bloomsbury Review )

As to books about poetry, you could hardly do better than Coming of Age as a Poet by superb U.S. critic Helen Vendler, in which she illuminates the first perfect poems by John Milton, John Keats, T. S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath. If in doubt about your critical criteria, read Vendler.
--Barry Hill (The Weekend Australian )

Helen Vendler is an invaluable presence in current literary studies because she knows that poems matter less for their thought than for their thinking--less, that is, for the ideological stances, usually familiar, that they adopt than for the processes of thinking and feeling and reacting that they re-create in us...She knows that "it is the writing that gives the theme life", and that "a writer's true 'vision' lies in the implications of his or her style." Rather than reducing poems to grist for the dark mills of ideology or theory, or getting the better of them by showing what she can do with them, she seeks to "e-valuate" them by drawing out their human significance. The case presented in Coming of Age as a Poet is straightforward: she sets the first "perfect" poem by each of her four poets--"the poem which first wholly succeeds in embodying a coherent personal style"--against their earlier attempts.
--John Creaser (Milton Quarterly )

This succinct but wide-ranging book, which began life as the James Murray Brown Lectures at the University of Aberdeen, looks to the early work of a number of poets in order to understand their individual quests for a personal style, for a voice or voices, and for a place in the world. (Year's Work in English Studies )

About the Author

Helen Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (March 13, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674010248
• ISBN-13: 978-0674010246
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,718,784 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best.., April 2, 2004

By 

G. D. Geiss (Harrisburg, Pa. USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Coming of Age as a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath (Hardcover)

This new book, like her others, (I own six) is superb. Ms. Vendler's own writing style is one of the most felicitous I have encountered in the literary commentary/critique genre. She never ever tries to prove to you how informed, smart, tasteful, and well read she is (and trust me she is all of those things in spades!). Rather, she shares, with intelligence, perception, clarity, and reason her love of poetry in general and the work currently at hand. And she manages this while staying pretty much within the oevre itself.

She reminds me of a life long resident of a great undiscovered country who possesses a particularly keen and practiced eye. She will here (and elsewhere) be your guide through its hills and dales, its hidden places and its common grounds. She is atuned to its seasons and its rythms and songs. And she would clearly rather do nothing else in the world than explore it with you. She expects you to look where she points, to see, and to think about what you have seen and how you feel about it and the journey itself. But she is always a loyal companion and her love of the place is infectious. Before long you may just find yourself exploring on your own with the memory of those trips with her as your inspiration and your compass.

If poetry can, at times, effect alchemic changes upon the soul, Ms. Vendler's work is a catalyst to that reaction. Here she traces the development toward a mature style of Milton, Keats, Elliot, and Plath. Her longer work on Keat's Odes may be more complete, but her work here with Milton and Elliot is compelling. She brings the former solidly forward from antiquity and, in my view, does nothing short of rescue the latter's "Prufrock" from the dust bin of obscuritanism. These poets (including Keats) and their works are more human, more common, more accessible, but just as majestic, after Ms. Vendler walks you past their early works. But it is, perhaps, the service that she does for Sylvia Plath that is here most noteworthy.

The sensationalism that has attached to Plath often obscures her considerable gift as a poet. By tracing the development of the young Plath from "Electra" through "Colosus" and "Parliament Fields" toward her mature style, Ms. Vendler shows us the kin of Keats and Elliot not the suicidal victem of madness and (perceived) oppression. She does not evade the "morality" and psychology that Plath's finale engenders, but insists that the poet is in her poems and that, in those, she lived and fought and loved and hurt and found ways to describe that process artfully. It is an effort that evidences the generosity and objectivity that always inform Ms. Vendler's work and it lets us see and feel Sylvia Plath better than we could before we read it.

You do not need to study poetry to read and enjoy this little book, but I think you will see the art in a different (and better) light after you do. Helen Vendler is absolutley THE BEST.

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poems worth knowing, and why, October 9, 2003

By 

Bruce P. Barten (Saint Paul, Minnesota, U.S.A.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Coming of Age as a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath (Hardcover)

This book might deserve a wider audience than it will receive, though it seems unlikely that readers of this book will find themselves better prepared to avoid any great catastrophe. I find myself looking for great themes that would make knowledge as a progression from century to century worth sustaining, but the themes of the poems in this book are only a small part of the analysis the poems are subjected to. I still do not know enough about poetry to find this book easy to read. At a lecture, I might absorb the points that are most obvious, but I like being able to refer to the main poems in print, reading slowly enough to actually be learning these poems, along with enough lines of other poetry in the text to serve as examples showing some kind of progress. It takes awhile to allow familiarity to develop gradually from an examination of the poems in conjunction with the comments of Helen Vendler about the level of mastery shown by the creators of these poems.

These lectures are highly informative for people who have some interest in poetry, but who have not mastered technical aspects of rhyme and verse that are particularly important in the analysis of the sonnets of Keats. Pages 68-70 show types of sonnets written by Keats, with dates of individual sonnets provided on pages 71-79. Helen Vendler shows an interest in phonic similarities like rhymes, taking ten lines on page 111 to line up words in the "reduplicative semiosis of the close" which starts eight lines from the end of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot to show multiple parallels of words associated with the mermaids singing. I am far more interested in themes than in methods of the poets, and the final chapter on Sylvia Plath is of interest to me primarily because the selected poem, "The Colossus," contains the line, "It's worse than a barnyard." (p. 124).

I find Milton difficult but important. Criticism of Milton is such a large field that the choice of a poem by Milton seems to be the obvious way to start a book like COMING OF AGE AS A POET. The poem selected as Milton's first masterpiece, "L'Allegro," is not as well known or well written about as some others, and I would like to offer a theological reflection on our position in time very similar to Milton's line, "This must not yet be so," (p. 15) from the Nativity Ode, "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity." Vendler prefers "the effortless ease of `L'Allegro.' The Nativity Ode aims at more, but strains at its ambitions. In it, Milton covers all of recorded time, . . ." (p. 13). "This must not yet be so," is a line that limits "those ychain'd in sleep" to keep waiting for "The wakefull trump of doom" (p. 15) to signal their salvation. I would not know nearly as much about that poem if I had not read Vendler's explanation. "The time-scheme of these ten lines (the last two of stanza XV and the eight lines of XVI) takes on the following journey:" (p. 15). Failure to understand what Milton is about seems to be the norm, but Milton also might have had a feeling that catastrophe could easily be described, but that catastrophe always ought to be kept waiting for some more modern poet to contemplate.

There is a great line within the 152 lines of "L'Allegro":

"The melting voice through mazes running;" (p. 22).

That is eleven lines from the end of the poem, describing the music available in cities, where, in the final line:

"Mirth with thee, I mean to live." (p. 22).

The poem is addressed to Mirth, which Vendler finds superior to, but in conflict with the kind of "contemplative pleasure in `Il Penseroso,' the Christian context immediately troubles the values earlier examined in `L'Allegro,' so much so that one can't simply view these poems as presenting the same person alternately and equably participating in mirth one day and contemplation the next." (p. 25).

Such a controlling idea of self is fundamental to the type of voice which Vendler pictures great poets achieving in their mature work. As much as we may disagree about the fixed nature of any form of maturity, I was glad to see the following evidence that she had noticed my favorite line:

"The Renaissance protagonist, with characteristic Miltonic competitiveness, will outdo Orpheus, since `the melting voice through mazes running' will produce such `streins as would have won the ear / Of Pluto, to have quite set free / His half-regain'd Eurydice.'" (pp. 25-26).

"The intrinsic qualities of high art are evoked, one by one, as Milton emphasizes, with respect to music, its emotionality by the verb `pierce'; its sweetness by the participial adjective `melting'; its complexity in the image of `mazes'; its power in the strength of the participial phrase `untwisting all the chains' and its headiness by the unexpected oxymorons in the `wanton' nature of its `heed' and the `giddy' nature of its `cunning.'" (p. 35).

"Needless to say, the m's and n's of this exquisitely `melting' passage are intuitive if not deliberate." (p. 35).

Ten lines of the poem, in which "The melting voice through mazes running" is line eight, are printed as an example of "the superbly unfolding hypotactic syntax that closes the poem:" (p. 38), followed by an attempt to explain the poem by spacing the words differently,

"If we graph this sentence, we can see its enchained nature:

With wanton heed,
and
giddy cunning, The melting voice
through mazes running,
Untwisting all the chains
that ty the soul." (p. 38).

"Milton has learned to slip from one compartment of his mind to another without strain, and with temperate pleasure--until he capitulates to a final intensity, the ecstatic feeling that arises when verse and music are combined." (p. 39).

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Exceptional Book, November 25, 2009

By 

Francis Lemfield - See all my reviews

This review is from: Coming of Age as a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath (Paperback)

I cannot say enough what an exceptional book "Coming of Age as a Poet" is. This is the first Helen Vendler book I ever read, and as an introduction to her enchanted garden of poetry I couldn't imagine a more felicitous guide. It was as if I had ventured into a new art form, her analyses in "Coming of Age" were that fecund.
Do I have any criticism at all? Perhaps that it wasn't long enough, but each essay must be like running a half-marathon to write. I'm more a modernist in prose, incline more towards Joyce and Faulkner, but these essays were as delightful reading and to me as germaine as anything on Beckett, even Dr. Vendler's handling of Milton and Keats, who in all honesty I knew little about.
For a person who is a literature buff, but to whom poetry is second to prose, "Coming of Age" is an achievement par excellence, a lucid, wondrous, erudite book.