Last Looks, Last Books (ebook)

Argumento de Last Looks, Last Books (ebook)

"Vendler convincingly demonstrates how this liminal moment demanded that each poet render a new style in his or her verse. By illuminating the varied and fluid poetic equilibrium between life and death in her precise, nuanced readings, Vendler shapes the reader's own last look at a major vein of American poetry."--Choice

"[A] book that needs to be read and heeded."--Peter Brooks, New York Review of Books

"[A] sumptuous banquet."--John Cunningham, Rain Taxi Review of Books

"Helen Vendler is our great biographer of the poem. . . . Her lucid, plain-spoken narratives make the poem seem as engrossing as a 'life of the poet' tale."--David Gewanter, Times Higher Education

One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2011

"Helen Vendler is one of the most lucid and incisive critics with which the art of poetry has been blessed, and this is one of her finest books--brilliant, moving, and a pleasure to read."--James Longenbach, University of Rochester

"This is an elegant, expressive, and often very poignant book. One can only admire Helen Vendler's skill in showing how these American poets confronted their own leave-taking."--Angus Fletcher, City University of New York

"Close reading of poems, especially for nonacademic audiences, is hard to find. This makes Helen Vendler's Last Looks, Last Books an attractive proposition. Vendler, long a tastemaker equally respected inside and outside the academy, wants to find out how her subjects 'do justice to both the looming presence of death and the unabated vitality of spirit.'"--Daisy Fried, New York Times Book Review

"Last Looks, Last Books is a valuable contribution to the understanding of the five poets' aesthetics and can thus be useful for both scholars and students as a source of new insights on these oeuvres, as well as for those interested in the interaction of death and artistic creation."--Boglárka Kiss, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies

"Vendler's insightful critical study is essential for lovers of these American poets. . . . Vendler makes an especially important case for Lowell . . . and thus provides readers a new means of appreciating these late poems."--Stephan Delbos, Prague Post0Acknowledgments ix
Chapter 1: Introduction: Last Looks, Last Books 1
Chapter 2: Looking at the Worst: Wallace Stevens's Th e Rock 25
Chapter 3: Th e Contest of Melodrama and Restraint: Sylvia Plath's Ariel 47
Chapter 4: Images of Subtraction: Robert Lowell's Day by Day 70
Chapter 5: Caught and Freed: Elizabeth Bishop and Geography III 94
Chapter 6: Self-Portraits While Dying: James Merrill and A Scattering of Salts 117
Notes 143