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Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology

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There may be something ominous to potential, non-student readers in the fact that this is a "textbook". What a bizarre thing! "Text" book. How is it different from a book? Well, it's a form of book that is meant to be taken very seriously because it's "required reading" and because it may help you on some standardized test. It may help you be standardized. A textbook about poetry is perhaps an oxymoron. Is there a standardized test that quantifies stirring of the soul or soaring heart?

This is an excellent "book" book on poetry and art in general. In fact, it's one of my favorite books. As soon as I finished it, I started at the beginning again. Except for the proposed questions for discussion or homework, there are very few "textbook" concessions. There is no talking down. It is intelligent and honest from beginning to end.

If you want to understand the basic elements of poetry, how it works, what it does that is different from other arts, there can be no finer work.

Helen Vendler has an extraordinary ability to see clearly the basis of a poem, working back through the words, rhythms, intonations,and references to the pre-verbal experience the poet had that required expression. She has an intuitive intelligence that is oddly contagious. Sensing her remarkable ability to listen, one's own power to listen is enhanced: I too can puzzle back to the heart of this poem and the experience at its core. Our personal experience has a deep commonality.

Finally, of course, it is a book about life. Poetry only exists as a communicative tool for interpreting the precious raw material of life. One says Well, I'm alive so what do I need it for? Well, because we're not alive, we're a little bit alive, brutally familiar with a very small part of life. So this being a book about great poetry addresses the great questions of life itself.

A few quick notes: HV has put together a superb anthology/teaching tool here. She's learned and yet accessible. Includes classics and new poems.
Also includes margin notes defining odd words used by Keats and others.
Full of definitions and examples for poetry terms.
Comprehensive and insightful!!! Great fun to browse through or to
deeply study.

Ms. Vendler is by far the most exciting and intelligent poetry critic of today. Her understanding of poets, particularly of their mature works, is thorough, thrilling, and refreshingly insightful. Read anything she's written on Robert Lowell, Wallace Stevens, Seamus Heaney, and Czeslaw Milosz and you will find, through her clarity, new reasons to fall in love with these magnificent poets.

I highly recommend two other books by Ms. Vendler: Part of Nature, Part of Us & The Music of What Happens. Though I am no longer a student, I continue to read these books to shreds. She does for poetry what Ms. Ingrid Rowland does for Art History. Experience Ms. Vendler for yourself, and while you're at it, get an online subscription of NYRB and you can read all the articles she's written for this brilliant magazine.

no sweat!

This review refers to the 1997 first edition with the bright red ribbon on the cover, instead of the 2002 Second Edition with the purple ribbon. I wish someone could tell us the difference between the two editions, besides price!

This really is a poetry anthology, like for a first or second level English Lit undergraduate course, yet it is so much more for being from Professor Helen Vendler, our most brilliant and discrete and careful critic and teacher of poetry, EVER!

Professor Vendler, who brought into even our baby reach The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Professor Vendler, who reveals for us the mysteries, the machinery and the might of Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form. Professor Helen Vendler, of Harvard, who shows us what it is to read Seamus Heaney and why we must, who awakens to us our hunger to seek all that we can. Vendler, who gives back to us our own America in Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets.

All that you find of Professor Vendler is gold, and a book for the long journey. Here we have the treasure chest in one.

The greatest regret in this book is that after over three hundred LARGE (9x6) pages of excellent commentary bringing us by the little hand through every aspect of English language lyric poetry, through each line of samples, she leaves us on our own, with three hundred pages of densely packed poetry arranged alphabetically by author's last name, more than a hundred poets with over 250 poems, from Shakespeare, Blake, Coleridge and John Clare through Emily Dickenson, Poe, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens. We see Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath, TS Eliot and of course, Mr. Yeats, and so many more it would be unfair to list only these few, yet impossible to list them all here. We have here the full (later) version od Colerdge's Rime. Of the Beats we have only two from Ginsberg: the Sunflower Sutra and one from the mid-Fifties entitled America, almost a shard of Walt Whitman, of whom we have much. We read Wordsworth and Williams and Wilbur. Dylan Thomas and Tennyson embrace, but I must stop listing here, unfair to those several unlisted.

Five appendices explore Prosody, Grammar, Speech Arts, Rhetorical Devices (my favorite) and Lyric subgenres. Indices of terms, first lines, authors and titles, as well as chronology fill out this comprehensive text.

But the gold, the bright and brilliant gold, is that First Part, in which Professor Vendler takes us so kindly, so gently, ever so slowly through all aspects of lyric poetry. In the first of the two sections preceding the Table of Contents, Prof. Vendler explains Part One thusly:

'This book offers ways to read and understand poems with the pleasure they deserve. Its nine chapters in Part I approach the poem from various directions, in the conviction that any artwork invites consideration from different perspectives. Chapter 1, "the Poem as Life" uses several short poems to show how a poetic utterance springs from a life-moment - sometimes a private one (falling in love), sometimes a public one (the decline of the aristocracy). Chapter 2, "The Poem as Arranged Life," considers the SAME POEMS (emphasis addded by me, c. scanlon!) that appear in Chapter 1, but this time treats them as arrangements, rather than utterances; it asks why the poem takes the imaginative shape it does, and how its elements have been ordered. In Chapter 3, "Poems as Pleasure," aspects of poetry that give pleasure are mentioned and illustrated: formal aspects such as rhythm and rhyme, of course, but also construction and images; thematic aspects such as poignancy and wisdom too, but in addition to these an individual personal language proper to each poet. Chapter 4, "Describing Poems," and Chapter 5, "The Play of Language," suggests some useful ways of describing poems - by the class of poems they belong to, by the little plots they act out through grammar and syntax, by the speech acts they engage in, by the agents they choose to do the work of the poem, and so on.
'Chapter 6, "Constructing a Self," moves on to the psychological world of the poem. Since each poem is a fictive speech by an imagined speaker, how does the author make that speaker convincing? How is a credible self constructed on the page? The more abstract lyric self of Chapter 6 - ungendered, of no spcific age or race, of no determined country - is contrasted, in Chapter 7, "Poetry and Social Identity," with the lyirc self which is socially marked, as we encounter a speaker making clear her sex, or his race, or his age, or her sexual orientation. Our sense of the purpose and the audience of a poem depends to a great extent on how the self of the speaker is defined. Chapter 8, "History and Regionality," takes up the topics of time and space - the two great axes on which all literature turns - as they apply to lyric poetry. And finally, in Chapter 9, "Attitudes, Values, Judgments," the largest questions we can put to a literary work - questions about its attitudes, values, and judgments - are raised and discussed with respect to some crucial examples, old and new.'
'Each of these chapters takes up several poems by way of illustration, and each is follwoed by a section called "Reading Other Poems" that introduces a small group of poems which can be usefully read in the light of that chapter (pp. v,vi).'

In other words, as a skilled and talented and profound and gentle instructor of lyric poetry, Professor Vendler first takes us carefully through the reading of poems in nine aspects, hand in hand. Each Chapter then provides further examples specifically chosen for examination in the light of that specific chapter aspect. After nine chapters, she too soon sets us free, on our own, into the vast universe of English lyrical poetry which is the Anthology of Part Two. We feel too soon let free, we feel the helping hands released from our new two wheel bicycle too soon as we ride on our own, and we fly back to the comfort of Part One for her loving accompaniement.

But, gentle reader, we may continue in the brilliance of Professor Vendler in her further works and commentaries, of Heaney, of Yeats and of Shakespearean sonnets as mentioned above, and also within Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats and of Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of Desire and The Odes of John Keats (Belknap Press) and so many countless others. Now, begin with Helen Vendler. Know our poetry.

This is a wonderful book. Vendler is a major academic and student of poetry and adds a voice of clarity and insight to the mysterious art of painting with words. This book demystifies the process of creating poetry so that the reader can fully appreciate what a poet does, revealing the real magic, which is clearly the intent of this book.

Vendler has been accused of being dry because she deconstructs and analyzes so well, but cogent analysis does not rob great art of its power; it only reveals its true genius at deeper levels. Vendler herself is an excellent and engaging academic writer, which makes this well organized book very readable and a useful reference.

A necessary book by a leading authority for anyone who is serious about poetry.
Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology

Helen Vendler's "Poems, Poets, Poetry" is an excellent introduction for the person studying alone. As a retired physician living in a remote rural area this book has been a Godsend. It leads the reader through chapters of gradually increasing complexity until one has gained an excellent understanding of poetry and poetic forms. Each chapter contains a fine range of poems related to the chapter topic. This allows the reader to build up a wide general knowledge of poems of various ages and types. A valuable anthology follows the chapters of textual instruction.

Helen Vendler knows poetry from the outside in and the inside out; this book will not only clue you in to how poetry works, why people write poetry, what makes a good poem, but will bring together the intrapsychic, social, political, and historical links that make poetry survive after a number of millennia. If you're a student who is assigned a book of poetry as an introduction, and it isn't this one, ask for a change. I don't know if the author is a poet, but she's the only critic and this seems to be the only textbook that seems to answer the question, "Why do people write poetry in the first place, and why do they feel so compelled to do so.

This is the best poetry anthology I've ever encountered! We had t read it for a class I was taking, but I would encourage any poetry fan to pick up a copy. The collection of poems is fabulous, and there are great chapters on their deeper meanings and some really nice, in depth deconstructions of a variety of poetry styles. Read this book!

There were sections of this book that I found offensive. She analyzes certain poems drawing from stereotypes placed on specific groups of people. In one poem i read, she assumed the characters were black because of the way they talked.

As ever, venerable Establishment icon Vendler pays standard attention to varieties of poetry standard by the fifties or earlier, but seems unaware that anything else (visual, infraverbal and mathematical poetry, for instance) exists. She's competent at what she limitedly does, however, so her book would probably be worth getting for apprentice readers and writers of poetry--until commercial or academic publishers of books like hers accidently publish one by someone knowledgeable about the best poetry composed since 1950.