The Music of What Happens

by Vendler, Helen Hennessy

• ISBN13: 9780674591530
• ISBN10: 0674591534
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1989-08-01
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem "Among School Children". View her insightful and passionate analysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course. Helen Vendler has become one of our most trusted companions in reading poetry. Among critics today she has 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 Silvia Plath, James Merrill, and Amy Clampitt.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(8)
I On Criticism
The Function of Criticism	9	(13)
Looking for Poetry in America	22	(20)
Critical Models: On Geoffrey Hartman	42	(7)
Defensive Harmonies: On Harold Bloom	49	(9)
The Medley Is the Message: On Roland Barthes	58	(17)
The Hunting of Wallace Stevens: Critical Approaches	75	(18)
II On Poetry
Lionel Trilling and Wordsworth's Immortality Ode	93	(22)
Keats and the Use of Poetry	115	(17)
Reading Walt Whitman	132	(17)
III On Poets
Seamus Heaney	149	(17)
Stephen Spender: Journals and Poems	166	(8)
Donald Davie: Self-Portraits in Verse	174	(23)
Ted Hughes	197	(12)
Czeslaw Milosz	209	(15)
John Ashbery, Louise Gluck	224	(38)
Allen Ginsberg	262	(10)
Sylvia Plath	272	(12)
Elizabeth Bishop	284	(16)
Anne Sexton	300	(10)
A. R. Ammons: Dwelling in the Flow of Shapes	310	(35)
IV Recent Writing
James Merrill	345	(23)
Adrienne Rich, Jared Carter, Philip Levine	368	(20)
Charles Wright	388	(10)
Amy Clampitt	398	(15)
Dave Smith	413	(11)
Frank Bidart	424	(7)
Michael Blumenthal	431	(6)
Louise Gluck, Stephen Dunn, Brad Leithauser, Rita Dove	437	(18)
Jorie Graham	455	(6)
Credits	461	(4)
Index	465