Description: The fundamental difference between rhetoric and poetry, according to Yeats, is that rhetoric is the expression of ones quarrels with others while poetry is the expression of ones quarrel with oneself. Through exquisite attention to outer and inner forms, Vendler explores the most inventive reaches of the poets mind.
Brief description: 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.
Review Quotes: Vendler can be as charming a tour guide through Yeats as she is a learned one. And her frame of examining Yeats's external and internal lyric structures offers a new, insightful, and often revelatory map of Yeatsian terrain.--Tess Taylor "Barnes and Noble Review" (12/3/2007 12:00:00 AM)