The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar : : Essays on Poets and Poetry / / Helen Vendler.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Harvard University Press Complete eBook-Package 2014-2015
• VerfasserIn: Vendler, Helen,
• Place / Publishing House: Cambridge, MA : : Harvard University Press, , [2015]; ©2015
• Year of Publication: 2015
• Edition: Pilot project. eBook available to selected US libraries only
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (390 p.)

A Times Higher Education Book of the Week One of our foremost commentators on poetry examines the work of a broad range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English, Irish, and American poets. The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar gathers two decades’ worth of Helen Vendler’s essays, book reviews, and occasional prose—including the 2004 Jefferson Lecture—in a single volume. “It’s one of [Vendler’s] finest books, an impressive summation of a long, distinguished career in which she revisits many of the poets she has venerated over a lifetime and written about previously. Reading it, one can feel her happiness in doing what she loves best. There is scarcely a page in the book where there isn’t a fresh insight about a poet or poetry.” —Charles Simic, New York Review of Books “Vendler has done perhaps more than any other living critic to shape—I might almost say ‘create’—our understanding of poetry in English.” —Joel Brouwer, New York Times Book Review “Poems are artifacts and [Vendler] shows us, often thrillingly, how those poems she considers the best specimens are made…A reader feels that she has thoroughly absorbed her subjects and conveys her understanding with candor, clarity, wit.” —John Greening, Times Literary Supplement

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- 1 The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar.How the Arts Help Us to Live -- 2. Fin-de-Siècle Lyric. W. B. Yeats and Jorie Graham -- 3. The Unweary Blues. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes -- 4. The Nothing That Is. Chickamauga, by Charles Wright -- 5. American X-Rays. Forty Years of Allen Ginsberg’s Poetry -- 6. The Waste Land. Fragments and Montage -- 7. The Snow Poems and Garbage. Episodes in A. R. Ammons’s Poetics -- 8. All Her Nomads. Collected Poems, by Amy Clampitt -- 9. Seamus Heaney and the Oresteia. “Mycenae Lookout” and the Usefulness of Tradition -- 10. Melville. The Lyric of History -- 11. Lowell’s Persistence. The Forms Depression Makes -- 12. Wallace Stevens. Hypotheses and Contradictions, Dedicated to Paul Alpers -- 13. Ardor and Artifice. Merrill’s Mozartian Touch -- 14. The Titles. A. R. Ammons, 1926–2001 -- 15. Poetry and the Mediation of Value. Whitman on Lincoln -- 16. “Long Pig”. The Interconnection of the Exotic, the Dead, and the Fantastic in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop -- 17. Stevens and Keats’s “To Autumn”. Reworking the Past -- 18. “The Circulation of Small Largenesses”. Mark Ford and John Ashbery -- 19. Wallace Stevens. Memory, Dead and Alive -- 20. Jorie Graham. The Moment of Excess -- 21. Attention, Shoppers. Where Shall I Wander, by John Ashbery -- 22. Seamus Heaney’s “Sweeney Redivivus”. Its Plot and Its Poems -- 23. The Democratic Eye. A Worldly Country, by John Ashbery -- 24. Losing the Marbles: James Merrill on Greece -- 25. Mark Ford: Intriguing, Funny, Prophetic -- 26. Notes from the Trepidarium. Stay, Illusion, by Lucie Brock-Broido -- 27. Pried Open for All the World to See. Berryman the Poet -- Notes -- Credits -- Ac know ledg ments -- Index