Romanticism coincided with two major historical developments: the Industrial Revolution, and with it, a turning point in our relationship to the earth, its inhabitants, and its climate. Drawing on Marxism and philosophy of science, The Calamity Form shines new light on Romantic poetry, identifying a number of rhetorical tropes used by writers to underscore their very failure to make sense of our move to industrialization.
 
Anahid Nersessian explores works by Friedrich Hölderlin, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and others to argue that as the human and ecological costs of industry became clear, Romantic poetry adopted formal strategies—among them parataxis, the setting of elements side by side in a manner suggestive of postindustrial dissonance, and apostrophe, here an address to an absent or vanishing natural environment—as it tried and failed to narrate the calamities of capitalism. These tropes reflect how Romantic authors took their bewilderment and turned it into a poetics: a theory of writing, reading, and understanding poetry as an eminently critical act. Throughout, Nersessian pushes back against recent attempts to see literature as a source of information on par with historical or scientific data, arguing instead for an irreducibility of poetic knowledge. Revealing the ways in which these Romantic works are of their time but not about it, The Calamity Form ultimately exposes the nature of poetry’s relationship to capital—and capital’s ability to hide how it works.

In this book, Tobias Menely develops a materialist ecocriticism, tracking the imprint of the planetary across a long literary history of poetic rewritings and critical readings which continually engage with the climate as a condition of human world making. Menely’s central archive is English poetry written between John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and Charlotte Smith’s “Beachy Head” (1807)—a momentous century and a half during which Britain, emerging from a crisis intensified by the Little Ice Age, established the largest empire in world history and instigated the Industrial Revolution. Incorporating new sciences into ancient literary genres, these ambitious poems aspired to encompass what the eighteenth-century author James Thomson called the “system . . . entire.” Thus they offer a unique record of geohistory, Britain’s epochal transition from an agrarian society, buffeted by climate shocks, to a modern coal-powered nation. Climate and the Making of Worlds is a bracing and sophisticated contribution to ecocriticism, the energy humanities, and the prehistory of the Anthropocene.

To find a personal style is, for a writer, to become adult; and to write one's first "perfect" poem--a poem that wholly and successfully embodies that style--is to come of age as a poet. By looking at the precedents, circumstances, and artistry of the first perfect poems composed by John Milton, John Keats, T. S. Eliot, and Sylvia Plath, Coming of Age as a Poet offers rare insight into this mysterious process, and into the indispensable period of learning and experimentation that precedes such poetic achievement.

Milton's L'Allegro, Keats's On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and Plath's The Colossus are the poems that Helen Vendler considers, exploring each as an accession to poetic confidence, mastery, and maturity. In meticulous and sympathetic readings of the poems, and with reference to earlier youthful compositions, she delineates the context and the terms of each poet's self-discovery--and illuminates the private, intense, and ultimately heroic effort and endurance that precede the creation of any memorable poem.

With characteristic precision, authority, and grace, Vendler helps us to appreciate anew the conception and the practice of poetry, and to observe at first hand the living organism that breathes through the words of a great poem.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

1. John Milton--The Elements of Happiness
2. John Keats--Perfecting the Sonnet
3. T. S. Eliot--Inventing Prufrock
4. Sylvia Plath--Reconstructing the Colossus

Notes
Credits
Index

Reviews of this book:
In Coming of Age as a Poet, Vendler...chooses one breakthrough poem by each of four poets--Milton, Keats, Eliot, and Plath. Through close readings of their structure, imagery, and scansion, she shows how these poems mark each poet's mastery of a unique voice...The clarity and expert analysis of all four poems could engage even a casual reader, while the breadth of scholarship and unique interpretations will appeal to more experienced poetry readers. Vendler's work is highly recommended.
--Vivian Reed, Library Journal

Reviews of this book:
Where does a poet's voice come from and of what is it forged? There's a question to bring out bootless reductionism if ever there was one, yet Helen Vendler explores it magnificently in its complexity and nuance in Coming of Age as a Poet.
--Katherine A. Powers, Boston Sunday Globe

Reviews of this book:
Reading a Vendler essay is like coming home to the cave; like entering the mind of the poet. In Coming of Age as a Poet, a collection of four essays, Vendler looks at the point in the lives of four poets...when they came into their own maturity as poets, found their discourses, the styles and the voices that would make them immortal...Vendler shows them on their vulnerable ascents to greatness.
--Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Reviews of this book:
A clear but subtle account of the struggles, the rites of passage, undergone by four poets, while still in their 20s, negotiating with tradition in order to find their style and attain their majority--to become, in fact, major poets...Each chapter becomes a short story, a thrillingly compressed account of the vicissitudes of genius...It is a pleasure to be guided by [Vendler] into the poet's workshop--she is so good at making poetry matter, at opening up the interest of passages one had dully taken for granted.
--Philip Horne, Guardian

Reviews of this book:
Though modest in size, Coming of Age contains numerous original insights into the creative process, especially into that formative period in which a poet finds his or her technique, style, and voice.
--D. D. Kummings, Choice

Reviews of this book:
Helen Vendler begins her brief study with a persuasive and delightful piece on the young Milton...[She] is brilliant on Keat's comparatively slow but sure practicing on the Petrarchan model...She is equally good, by contrast, on the gradual evolution of Eliot's 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock'...[This book is] full of perceptions and rewards that send one scurrying back to the text.
--John Bayley, New York Review of Books

Reviews of this book:
[Vendler's] attention to the psychological and aesthetic unraveling of the poet's calling turns the microscopic into the majestic.
--Jacques Khalip, Boston Review

Reviews of this book:
Using Milton, Keats, Eliot and Path as her case studies, Ms. Vendler 'consider[s] the work a young poet has to have done before writing his or her first "perfect poem"--the poem which first wholly succeeds in embodying a coherent personal style.' This is a bold claim and a challenging book, but Ms. Vendler succeeds brilliantly in keeping us hooked. By the end we are better readers.
--Tom Mayo, Dallas Morning News

Reviews of this book:
[Vendler] has offered up a brief but profound inspiration to any reader willing to take the time to move slowly, with curiosity and attention, through her investigation of four cases of great poetry.
--Len Edgerly, Bloomsbury Review

Reviews of this book:
As to books about poetry, you could hardly do better than Coming of Age as a Poet by superb U.S. critic Helen Vendler, in which she illuminates the first perfect poems by John Milton, John Keats, T. S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath. If in doubt about your critical criteria, read Vendler.
--Barry Hill, The Weekend Australian

In Coming To, Timothy M. Harrison uncovers the forgotten role of poetry in the history of the idea of consciousness. Drawing our attention to a sea change in the English seventeenth century, when, over the course of a half century, “conscience” made a sudden shift to “consciousness,” he traces a line that leads from the philosophy of René Descartes to the poetry of John Milton, from the prenatal memories of theologian Thomas Traherne to the unresolved perspective on natality, consciousness, and ethics in the philosophy of John Locke. Each of these figures responded to the first-person perspective by turning to the origins of how human thought began. Taken together, as Harrison shows, this unlikely group of thinkers sheds new light on the emergence of the concept of consciousness and the significance of human natality to central questions in the fields of literature, philosophy, and the history of science.
 

In an important distinction from other studies of Irish poetry, Potts moves beyond the influence of history and politics on contemporary Irish pastoral poetry to consider the relatively recent influence of ecology. Contemporary Irish poets often rely on the motif of the pastoral retreat to highlight various environmental threats to those retreats—whether they be high-rises, motorways, global warming, or acid rain. Potts concludes by speculating on the future of pastoral in contemporary Irish poetry through her examination of more recent poets—including Moya Cannon and Paula Meehan—as well as other genres such as film, drama, and fiction.

Scholars have often viewed the Hundred Years’ War (c. 1337–1453) between England and France as sharpening animosity and isolationism. Further, medievalists have often characterized translator–source relationships as adversarial. In Continental England, Elizaveta Strakhov develops a new model, reparative translation, as a corrective to both formulations. Zeroing in on formes fixes poetry—and Chaucer as a leading practitioner—she shows that translation played two essential, interrelated roles: it became a channel for rebuilding fragmented communities, and it restored unity to Francophone cultural landscapes fractured by war. Further, used in particular to express England’s aspirational relationship to Francophone culture despite the ongoing war, translation became the means by which England negotiated a new vision of itself as Continental rather than self-contained. Chaucer’s own translation work and fusion of Francophone and Italian humanist influences in his poetry rendered him a paradigmatic figure for England’s new bid for Continental relevance. Interpreting Chaucer’s posthumous canonization as a direct result of reparative translation, Strakhov shows how England’s transition from island to Continental constituent problematizes our contemporary understandings of nation-bound authors and canons.