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Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats

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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.

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.

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.

I have long enjoyed and appreciated the helpful, brilliant and clear writings of Professor Vendler, opening to even my poor understanding the means and meanings of our great poets, including The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets which bears a CD of her reading of the sonnets, selected.

In particular I read intermittently her unmatchable volume length study of Irish poet Yeats entitled Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form, so reasonable, so measured, so close to her subject with affection and intelligence. For instance, see her discussion there of the poem of Leda and the Swan, and compare this with more gender-political readings, and gratefully acknowledge her scholarly approach.

So I was drawn to this present volume, simply for the section on Mr. Yeats, and discover so much more, in Dickinson, Whitman and Pope, poet I might otherwise overlook but here find deeply revealed.

Professor Vendler does require the attention of her reader as she reveals why these poets reward our greatest and most careful attention. She serves as a fine, generous and meticulous guide to the treasure concealed. Perhaps she may best be read within the context of an advanced course in English literature, of the sort no longer offered, with the loving, living presence of a patient, tireless and resilient professor, but such a dream may no longer be, and we are blessed by this book in hand, and the chance to read and to read once more the words of this great and patient professor of our poetry, armed with The Oxford Companion to English Literature or similar reference such as the Bennet for understanding the full meaning of the terms used here, terms which would have been acquired in lower level courses, terms we might not yet have upon the tip of our fingers, but which are essential for our comprehension, terms which are good to know.

Kindly, Professor Vendler brings us into this secret garden, this hidden world of knowing our literature, with great patience and delight, and we are fortunate to find her wonderful work so distilled in this slim volume. Caution is given elsewhere to pursue the New Edition of 160 pages, not the 2004 first printing, which I have now.

Above all else, read the work, the poetry, grateful for all that this good professor reveals to us within, clearly, correctly, cogently.

Please see also her study of Irish poet Seamus Heaney and her anthology of poetry, etc.

I have followed religiously book by book by Helen Vendler, both the scholar and the critic of contemporary poetry, and, much as it saddens me to say it, my feeling is that the last few book have lost a great deal of the passion and intellectual acuity that I had grown to expect from her. Perhaps this is a natural consequence of age, though perhaps not an inevitable consequence, as one of her heroes, W. B. Yeats, has shown.