Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats [Paperback]

Helen Vendler (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 067402110X | ISBN-13: 978-0674021105 | Publication Date: April 15, 2006

Poetry has often been considered an irrational genre, more expressive than logical, more meditative than given to coherent argument. And yet, in each of the four very different poets she considers here, Helen Vendler reveals a style of thinking in operation; although they may prefer different means, she argues, all poets of any value are thinkers.

The four poets taken up in this volume--Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and William Butler Yeats--come from three centuries and three nations, and their styles of thinking are characteristically idiosyncratic. Vendler shows us Pope performing as a satiric miniaturizer, remaking in verse the form of the essay, Whitman writing as a poet of repetitive insistence for whom thinking must be followed by rethinking, Dickinson experimenting with plot to characterize life's unfolding, and Yeats thinking in images, using montage in lieu of argument.

With customary lucidity and spirit, Vendler traces through these poets' lines to find evidence of thought in lyric, the silent stylistic measures representing changes of mind, the condensed power of poetic thinking. Her work argues against the reduction of poetry to its (frequently well-worn) themes and demonstrates, instead, that there is always in admirable poetry a strenuous process of thinking, evident in an evolving style--however ancient the theme--that is powerful and original.

(20040801)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Poetry is often regarded as the product of inspiration rather than intellect. Vendler seeks to emphasize the importance of thought in poetry...She shows poetic thought as reflected in poetic voice, structure, and prosody in four poets: Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and W. B. Yeats...Vendler's convincing and illuminating arguments make this book highly recommended.
--Amy K. Weiss (Library Journal 20041010)

[Vendler's] thoughtful and insightful readings of poems by Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and William Butler Yeats demonstrate the central and indeed essential role of sophisticated thinking in the poetic enterprise...To navigate the intricacies of thought that a poem contains, it is hard to imagine a better guide than Vendler herself. Her most admirable achievement is perhaps her ability to illuminate the connection between what a poem says and the formally oriented issue of how it says it. One might have expected a book explicitly on poetic thinking to neglect form, and focus only on content. But Vendler considers this approach a serious mistake, and her insights regarding form constitute the strongest argument for this position.
--Troy Jollimore (San Francisco Chronicle 20041017)

Some people seem surprised by the idea that poets do any thinking at all. There is a popular image of the poet as a wild, inspired, untutored and half-mad figure striding across the heath. Helen Vendler's new book, Poet's Thinking, if it is read as widely as it ought to be, will help considerably to correct this misperception. (San Francisco Chronicle 20050101)

In her challenging and entertaining new book, Poets Thinking, Helen Vendler argues that poetry in all its manifestations, however ostensibly irrational, is a mode of thinking that commands not just our aesthetic appreciation but also our intellectual respect...Vendler is a wonderful elucidator of individual poems. Nobody writes more insightfully about a poem's stylistic armature, and the emotional and intellectual purposes that armature serves. And by examining the distinctive strategies of thinking in the work of such radically different poets as Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, and Yeats, Vendler makes visible aspects of style and language that other critics simply haven't seen.
--Alan Shapiro (Harvard Magazine 20050428)

One of the most distinguished critics of poetry in the English-speaking world...Vendler engages in close reading to find a poem's distinctiveness of language and literary form...Vendler is really trying to enlarge our idea of what poetry can be...In reminding us to look at and listen to the actual words on the page, and not to leap too soon to some hackneyed idea that they recall, Vendler invites us to expand our own response to experience.
--Christopher Benfey (New York Review of Books 20051007)

Vendler's close readings lay bare the process of poetic reflection: Poets Thinking is about how rather than what poets think, about the act of the mind rather than any 'embalmed thought' that readers might want to extract from verse...Vendler is exceptionally skilled at demonstrating that poetry offers us pictures of the mind at work rather than settled axioms to take away...[Poets Thinking] has a good deal to offer in the way of thought-provoking and sometimes dazzling readings of British and American poetry.
--Fiona Green (Times Literary Supplement )

Helen Vendler's Poets Thinking is lucid, accessible, and inspired...Vendler's own voice is that rare academic combination of expertise and accommodation...Her arguments provide ample explanation and exempla for the lay reader while provoking the academic to revisit old assumptions. She is at ease with the broad sweep of American and English poetry and with the critical methods of the last half-century. Her conclusions seem remarkably self-evident, a voice of trustworthiness and reason that encourages us to lean closer, to listen carefully.
--Lynnell Edwards (Georgia Review )

About the Author

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

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (April 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067402110X
• ISBN-13: 978-0674021105
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #116,894 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #44 in Books > Education & Reference > Encyclopedias > History

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not an Easy, but a Rewarding Read, August 11, 2005

By 

Robert Hoeppner (Southwick, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats (Hardcover)

I can't believe this book hasn't been reviewed yet. I found it a very thought-provoking insight into the techniques of these four poets. I particularly enjoyed the analyses of Whitman and Yeats, with the Pope and Dickinson running close second. This is not popularized dumbed-down literary criticism, but a rigorous examination of substantive issues. You will get out of it what you put into it.

Pope: His caricature devices include synecdoche, diminutive nicknames, scientific reduction (gold is yellow dirt), classical allusion, anticlimax (wisest, brightest, meanest), and word substitution (damned to everlasting [condemnation] fame).

Whitman: One of his devices is to state things reportorially, and then to restate them from a position of extreme empathetic identification with the things described, shifting from an emphasis on verbs to an emphasis on nouns; narrative incident turns to lyric description.

Dickinson: She gives the semblance of control by dividing a process into a series of arbitrary slots which she fills with detail, e.g a poem about a train's journey makes several stops at certain places, but other possible places it could have stopped are not mentioned. Vendler labels this "chromatic linear advance." Early on there was a definite ending in her poems, but this became more ambiguous as she got older. Also, things went from being ordered chronologically to being ordered in an emotional hierarchy.

Yeats: Overlayed images to present a vertical harmony of choral unison. Here's a typical Vendler sentence: "Yeats's bitter diptychs, though presented serially, are contrived so as to assemble themselves ultimately into a densely overwritten palimpsest." He frequently moved a single poem's mode from narration to meditation to an ode.

That's about 120 pages of densely overwritten Helen Vendler in a nutshell.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thinking betwixt the lines: scientific rigor and received divine inspiration., July 3, 2006

By 

Dr. Kasumu O. Salawu (Maplewood, New Jersey USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats (Paperback)

Arguably the most widely read poetry critic in the US today, Professor Helen Hennessey Vendler displays characteristic erudition in this work on Pope, Whitman, Dickinson and Yeats. Reviewing her book is as recursive as viewing a picture in a dream.

Her arguments rescue poem making from the exclusive precinct of mythical and mystical mediums yet they do not surrender it to the uncompromising demands of logical positivists. As strongly as John Hollander craves rhyme and reason, Vendler imputes intentionality. For each of the four poets she reads, she demonstrates quintessential styles in rational thought and lyrical composition without any of them sacrificing variety.

There are interesting suggestions in this book - one, for instance, is that where the prolific reader-writer-critic and her former colleague at Harvard, Harold Bloom, an acclaimed Shakespeare authority, makes assertions about poets and their poems, Vendler, a veteran Yeats scholar, produces evidence. A devotee and biographer of Irish Nobel laureate, Seamus Heaney, Vendler, the polymath, who holds an undergraduate degree in Chemistry, is a literary guide as accessible to the lay reader as she is to the academic. Would not Emily Dickinson have reaffirmed that Vendler's mind is wider than the sky?

An invitation to sample Vendler's resourcefulness, eloquence and control of her material in a Harvard classroom is currently posted on each of Amazon.com's web site for Vendler's books, "Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets" and "The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets and Critics." This thorough, 48-minute explication of Yeats' poem "Among School Children," an intertexture of Greek mythology, philosophy and mathematics, continues for about ten pages in Poets Thinking.

One note of caution: the first impression of this book was dated 2004 and it had 142 pages - be careful to purchase the one on this page, the `New Ed' edition that has 160 pages.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Surprise! Poets are thinkers!, June 26, 2007

By 

Martin H. Dickinson "Walker in the woods, dis... (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats (Paperback)

Vendler is very entertaining--she truly holds her reader and gets us right inside the poems themselves. That's rare among today's literary critics, an almost forgotten way of thinking about poetry.

"Even when a poem seems to be a spontaneous outburst of feeling, it is being directed as a feat of ordered language, by something one can only call thought. Yet in most accounts of the internal substance of poetry, critics continue to emphasize the imaginative or irrational or psychological or 'expressive' base of poetry; it is thought to be an art of which there can be no science."

She goes on to illustrate for us what "poetic thinking" actually is with illustrations from some of our greatest poets.

Readers of my reviews will know of my enthusiasm for Vendler's commentary on Shakespeare's sonnets The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets as well as my appreciation for Emily Dickinson as shown in my reviews of The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition and The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson (Cambridge Companions to Literature).

Vendler's treatment of Emily Dickinson is especially interesting. The great crisis in Dickinson's poetry happens when her instinctive practice of serially filled in chromatic advance encounters unavoidable fissure, fracture, rupture and abyss.

And what an opening this provides Dickinson!

Vendler guides us through the opened up strategies Dickinson employs in "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" (372; 1862); "Before I got my eye put out-" 336; 1862) and many other great poems. She is at her best, I think, in her treatment of "Renunciation - is a piercing Virtue" (782; 1863).

Poets have what they refer to as "moves," or ways of handling particular situations that come up in the writing of poetry. William Stafford has "moves" and he talks about them frequently in his writings on poetry. Some of the very best "moves" are the ones Dickinson makes--and certainly Yeats as well. Vendler as a critic is very sensitive to this. She is always on the trail and looking for the "moves" a poet is making.

Vendler's looks are convincing, even though she may not be the last word on everything and she may not always get everything exactly right.

With a good deal of literary criticism today you as a reader want to scream: "Stop! Read the poem you nitwit!"

Thank the stars, there's Vendler.