by Helen Vendler
Harvard University Press, 2015
Paper: 978-0-674-98408-0 | eISBN: 978-0-674-42572-9 | Cloth: 978-0-674-73656-6
Library of Congress Classification PN1031.V365 2015
Dewey Decimal Classification 818.1

ABOUT THIS BOOK | REVIEWS | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK

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


See other books on: Bird | Ocean | Poets Poetry | Scholar | Vendler, Helen
See other titles from Harvard University Press