The given and the made

By Helen Hennessy Vendler

How does a poet repeatedly over a lifetime make art out of an arbitrary assignment of fate? By asking this question of the work of four American poets - two men of the postwar generation, two young...

Odes of John Keats

By Helen Hennessy Vendler

The Odes of John Keats Belknap Press

By Helen Hennessy Vendler

On Extended Wings

By Helen Hennessy Vendler

Though Wallace Stevens' shorter poems are perhaps his best known, his longer poems, Helen Hennessy Vendler suggests in this book, deserve equal fame and equal consideration. Stevens' central theme-...

On Extended Wings

By Helen Hennessy Vendler

The Art of Shakespeare s Sonnets

By Helen Hennessy Vendler

Part of nature, part of us

By Helen Hennessy Vendler

A collection of book reviews and essays on more than forty modern American poets.

The poetry of George Herbert

By Helen Hennessy Vendler

Seamus Heaney

By Helen Hennessy Vendler

Helen Vendler traces Heaney's invention as it evolves from his beginnings in Death of a Naturalist (1966) through his most recent volume, The Spirit Level (1996). In sections entitled "Second Thoug...

Soul says

By Helen Hennessy Vendler

To know the poetry of our time, to look through its lenses and filters, is to see our lives illuminated. In these eloquent essays on recent American, British, and Irish poetry, Helen Vendler shows...