From Library Journal
Following The Harvard Book of Contemporary Poetry ( LJ 11/15/85), Vendler's hand-picked anthology of 20th-century American poets, this collection of recent essays gives us deeper insight into the poets Vendler admires. Vendler focuses on a work's uniqueness rather than its meaning or ideology. Like French critic Roland Barthes, she insists that pleasure motivates writers, and her own favorites (Stevens, Merrill, Ammons, Ashbery) prefer invention to social or psychological realism. Vendler sniffs out sloppy writing and overstatement with deadly accuracy: to a poet's claim that Anne Sexton suffered from "the problematic position of women," she asks: "Was it the problematic position of men . . . that created personal trouble in John Berryman's life?" Recommended for academic and large public libraries.Lisa Mullenneaux, Iowa City, Ia.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Vendler is essential, whether one delights or despairs in her views. More,
The Music of What Happens is the essential Vendler. (G. E. Murray
Chicago Tribune )
Any criticism that develops so complex a sense of what really good poetry does, and develops it so lovingly, is to be cherished. (Alan Williamson
Boston Globe )
Vendler's is an ample book...and will give us enough to go on digesting and arguing about, approving and resisting, for a long time yet. (Charles Tomlinson
Times Literary Supplement )
The Music of What Happens, with its deft, precise treatment of the configurative strategies of Ashbery, Heaney, Ginsberg, Sexton, and others reminds us why, ultimately, we might put the newspaper down and read a poem instead. (Robert Lindsey,
Bloomsbury Review )
Polite, decisive, and insightful, Vendler is our most distinguished critic of modern poetry. In this collection she deals with writers as diverse as Donald Davie and A. R. Ammons...It is her own likes and dislikes, tirelessly examined and cross-examined, that give her frequent bursts of critical eloquence the foundation of truth. (
Choice )
