As good as a poetry textbook could be | Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology

WONDERFUL BOOK! | Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology | Helen Vendler

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	• Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology Helen Vendler Bedford/St. Martin's, 2002 - 715 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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Not only a textbook . . .

Ms. Vendler is by far the most exciting and intelligent poetry critic of today. Her understanding of poets, particularly of their mature works, is thorough, thrilling, and refreshingly insightful. Read anything she's written on Robert Lowell, Wallace Stevens, Seamus Heaney, and Czeslaw Milosz and you will find, through her clarity, new reasons to fall in love with these magnificent poets.

I highly recommend two other books by Ms. Vendler: Part of Nature, Part of Us & The Music of What Happens. Though I am no longer a student, I continue to read these books to shreds. She does for poetry what Ms. Ingrid Rowland does for Art History. Experience Ms. Vendler for yourself, and while you're at it, get an online subscription of NYRB and you can read all the articles she's written for this brilliant magazine.

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As good as a poetry textbook could be

There may be something ominous to potential, non-student readers in the fact that this is a "textbook". What a bizarre thing! "Text" book. How is it different from a book? Well, it's a form of book that is meant to be taken very, very seriously because it is "required reading" for a required course and because it will help the worthy achieve mightily in the "standardized testing" they will have to take to prove themselves. Like most books, a "text" book has words in it, i.e. a text. We assumed that. The tautologous term "text" seems to have been added by some utterly pretentious, youth- despising pedant who wanted to quell and trample upon whatever inner happiness a kid may have felt at the propect of learning something new. A textbook about poetry is perhaps an oxymoron. Is there a standardized test for stirring of the soul or the soaring heart?

This is an excellent "book" book on poetry and art in general. In fact, it's one of my favorite books, and I've read alot. As soon as I finished it, I started at the beginning again. Except for the proposed questions for discussion or homework, there are very few "textbook" concessions. There is no talking down. It is intelligent and honest from beginning to end. In fact, having known many college age students in recent years nearly all of whom had the attention spans of mosquitoes, I wondered how far any would get in this book. It's too intelligent to serve as a modern textbook really.

But for people who love poetry, have hope invested in poetry, it's great. If you want to understand the basic elements of poetry, how it works, what it does that is diffeent from other arts, there can be no finer work.

Just as Browning read Johnson's Dictionary in preparation for a career as a poet, so I would imagine young poets and poetry lovers will in future read Professor Vendler.

Helen Vendler has an extraordinary ability to see clearly the basis of a poem, working back through the words, rhythms, intonations,and references to the pre-verbal experience the poet had that required expression. She has an intuitive intelligence that is oddly contagious. Sensing her remarkable ability to listen, one's own power to listen is enhanced: I too can puzzle back to the heart of this song and this experience. Our personal experience has a deep commonality. In other words, you can, after a while, learn the art of "close reading". It's a how-to book. And it's quite exciting, in a way, like suddenly being able to ride a bike on your own.

Finally, of course, it is a book about life. Poetry only exists as a communicative tool for interpreting the raw material, precious raw material, of life. One says Well, I'm alive so what do I need it for? Well, because we're not alive, we're semi-alive, brutally familiar with a very small part of life. So this being a book about great poetry addresses the great questions of life itself.

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WONDERFUL BOOK!

A few quick notes: HV has put together a superb anthology/teaching tool here. She's learned and yet accessible. Includes classics and new poems.
Also includes margin notes defining odd words used by Keats and others.
Full of definitions and examples for poetry terms.
Comprehensive and insightful!!! Great fun to browse through or to
deeply study.