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The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics
Helen Vendler was one of our most trusted companions in reading poetry. She had an unrivaled ability to show--lucidly and invitingly--just what a poem does. Insight and wit distinguish these essays, in which Vendler elucidates the function of criticism as well as different critical methods and styles. Poets commented on range from Seamus Heaney and Czeslaw Milosz to Sylvia Plath, James Merrill, and Amy Clampitt.
Book Details
- Publisher: Harvard University Press
- Publish Date: Jan 1st, 1989
- Pages: 486
- Language: English
- Edition: Revised - undefined
- Dimensions: 9.20in - 6.13in - 1.20in - 1.34lb
- EAN: 9780674591530
- Categories: • Semiotics & Theory• Poetry
About the Author
Vendler, Helen: - 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.
Praise for this book
Vendler's is an ample book...and will give us enough to go on digesting and arguing about, approving and resisting, for a long time yet.--Charles Tomlinson "Times Literary Supplement"
The Music of What Happens, with its deft, precise treatment of the configurative strategies of Ashbery, Heaney, Ginsberg, Sexton, and others reminds us why, ultimately, we might put the newspaper down and read a poem instead.--Robert Lindsey "Bloomsbury Review"
Any criticism that develops so complex a sense of what really good poetry does, and develops it so lovingly, is to be cherished.--Alan Williamson "Boston Globe"
Vendler is essential, whether one delights or despairs in her views. More, The Music of What Happens is the essential Vendler.--G. E. Murray "Chicago Tribune"
Polite, decisive, and insightful, Vendler is our most distinguished critic of modern poetry. In this collection she deals with writers as diverse as Donald Davie and A. R. Ammons... It is her own likes and dislikes, tirelessly examined and cross-examined, that give her frequent bursts of critical eloquence the foundation of truth.-- "Choice"