Description: In a compilation of essays and reviews written for the New York Times Book Review and other outlets during the 1960s and 1970s, Helen Vendler offers a dazzling retrospective of the authors who defined twentieth-century American poetry, including T. S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich, and Elizabeth Bishop.
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 exhibits in abundance the qualities our poets long for, virtues that make the essays and reviews here collected useful to everybody concerned with the nation's culture. High among these virtues is the fullness of Vendler's sympathy with the poets whose work she examines, but even prior to that gift there is her point of view.--Irvin Ehrenpreis "New York Review of Books"