The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry

About this book

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 Vendlers essays book reviews and occasional proseincluding the 2004 Jefferson Lecturein 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 Stevenss memorable formulation inhabit a geography of the dead. These essays also remind us that without the enthusiasm critiques and books of each centurys scholars there would be imperfect perpetuation and transmission of culture. All of the modern poets who have long preoccupied VendlerWallace Stevens Seamus Heaney John Ashbery and Jorie Grahamare 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 todays 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 poetrys beautiful subversive sustaining and demanding legacy.