Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar Paperback by Helen Vendler

Product Details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press (2018-05-14)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 464 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780674984080
• Item Weight: 368.55 grams
• Dimensions: 0.0 x 0.0 x 0.0 cm

“One of [Vendler’s] finest books, an impressive summation of a long, distinguished career.”
—Charles Simic, New York Review of Books

A Times Higher Education Book of the Week.

A lively collection of the great critic’s later work showcases her unswerving and deeply personal dedication to good poetry.

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. Taken together, they serve as a reminder that if the arts and the patina of culture they cast over the world were deleted, we would, in Wallace Stevens’s memorable formulation, inhabit “a geography of the dead.” These essays also remind us that without the enthusiasm, critiques, and books of each century’s scholars, there would be imperfect perpetuation and transmission of culture.

All of the modern poets who have long preoccupied Vendler—Wallace Stevens, Seamus Heaney, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham—are fully represented, as well as others, including Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Amy Clampitt, James Merrill, A. R. Ammons, and Mark Ford. And Vendler reaches back into the poetic tradition, tracing the influence of Keats, Yeats, Whitman, T. S. Eliot, and others in the work of today’s poets. As ever, her readings help to clarify the imaginative novelty of poems, giving us a rich sense not only of their formal aspects but also of the passions underlying their linguistic and structural invention. The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar is an eloquent plea for the centrality, both in humanistic study and modern culture, of poetry’s beautiful, subversive, sustaining, and demanding legacy.

About the Author

Helen Vendler (1933–2024) was a leading poetry critic and the author of nineteen books on poets from William Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney. A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, she contributed regularly to the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, and the New Republic. She was the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.