Part of Nature, Part of Us

Modern American Poets

Helen Vendler

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1980
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674305069
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

"Vendler sparkles."
—Irvin Ehrenpreis, New York Review of Books

America's foremost critic savors the poetry that made—and remade—our twentieth-century canon.

The American poet Randall Jarrell once defined the ideal critic as "an extremely good reader—one 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 poet's 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 poets—including Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich—Vendler 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 clichés. 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 Vendler's unmatched ability to pinpoint great poets' value as thinkers, as artists, and, finally, as humans.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Wallace Stevens
• Marianne Moore
• T. S. Eliot
• Robert Penn Warren
• W. H. Auden
• Elizabeth Bishop
• Randall Jarrell
• John Berryman
• Robert Lowell
• Howard Nemerov
• Frank O’Hara
• Allen Ginsberg
• James Merrill
• W. S. Merwin
• Adrienne Rich
• Sylvia Plath
• Charles Wright
• Dove Smith
• Louise Glück
• Broodsides
• Eight Poets
• Ten Poets
• Books Discussed