Part of Nature Part of Us: Modern American Poets (Peabody Museum)

About this book

Vendler sparkles. Irvin Ehrenpreis New York Review of Books Americas foremost critic savors the poetry that madeand remadeour twentieth-century canon. The American poet Randall Jarrell once defined the ideal critic as an extremely good readerone who has learned to show to others what he saw in what he read. By this measure Helen Vendler is the best of her generation. Never doctrinaire or merely academic she is an evangelist for poetic truth guiding readers along the tracks of her own authoritative readings to disclose the interplay of form feeling and perception that defines each poets idiosyncratic vision of the world. A compilation of essays and reviews written for the New York Times Book Review and other outlets Part of Nature Part of Us is a dazzling retrospective of the authors who defined midcentury American poetry. The work collected here originally published in the late 1960s and 1970s marks the first time that canonical modern poets like T. S. Eliot Marianne Moore and Sylvia Plath could be judged from a critical distance. Reviewing more recent poetsincluding Robert Lowell Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne RichVendler also gives readers a chance to share in the freshness of her first impressions. Throughout she is unforgiving but never unfair. She exults those who like Lowell show an essential fidelity to perception who say what happened without stumbling into a mass of clichs. But she is unsparing with those who come to distrust their own emotions and retreat into clinical facticity like the later Moore. Unflinching engrossing and frequently poetic in its own right Part of Nature Part of Us confirms Vendlers unmatched ability to pinpoint great poets value as thinkers as artists and finally as humans.