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davenash's review against another edition
3.0
Vendler's book examines how the last five great American poets faced death or as she puts it "the crucial recrystallization of self in the lasting art that shines only "from the inmost depths" of an imaginative life."
The poets - Wallace Stevens, Syliva Plath, Rober Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill like all of us faced death. Death for them occurs in a godless world. How did that shape their last poems?
Vendler finds a turning point bewteen Stevens writing in the early fifties and Lowell writing in the mid seventies:
"The enormous difference in tone between Stevens' ornate murmuring farewells and Lowell's acute and worldly images - an art-nouveau church window, an nightmare of being swallowed alive, Cousin Belle's sofa, cardinals in flight, a family photograph - testifies to the major change in the elegiac vocabulary of American poetry brought about by Robert Lowell."
I think this mirrors society, which Vendler doesn't mention. Most strikingly the departure from the traditional Latin Mass to the Norvos Ordo in the Catholic Church. The same mistake the church made is the same mistake poetry made. Both abandoned a vocabulary of imagery collectively built and validated over millennium. Works of art that strike at the root of the collective consciousness exchanged for the new and avante garde. What's new today is old tomorrow and there is nothing new under the sun. The later poets don't match Stevens and Plath's death facing poems.
Vendler' s chapter on Plath was the best. Her insight on Plath is also her most pithy conclusion:
"She was always a posthumous person, but it took her years to acquire a posthumous style."
Vendler is a distinguished Harvard professor and frequent reviewer of poetry for the New York Review of Books and other high brow publications. Her book has an academic voice. What was more difficult is how she jumps from poem to poem. This required me to go back and read the poem again because she does some close but brief textual analysis. So the book is only 140 pages but its slow reading because of the academic verbosity and many peoms examined.
Vendler doesn't explain in the opening chapter why she chose these five poets or why she's writing it. She also doesn't conclude and bring it together. I understood the progression from Stevens to Lowell but why Bishopn and Merrill? To prove that elegiac poetry changed after Lowell? Bishop's abilities faded with age and she didn't write facing death, like Merrill who had AIDS and Stevens who had cancer and Plath who had been trying to kill herself since she was ten.
Vendler also comes off as snooty. Plath wrote a sonnet that was in 2 meters instead of 5 and Venlder feels the need to put quotes around sonnet to signify that it is not a proper sonnet. This attitude is why people don't read poetry. Again she objects to Lowell's prose like poem and calls it barely respectable poetry. What is respectable poetry? How about Bukowski or Dylan?
Evidently, departure from traditional vocabulary is good but departure from traditional form is bad. I thought form follows function and tail shouldn't wag the dog.
The poets - Wallace Stevens, Syliva Plath, Rober Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill like all of us faced death. Death for them occurs in a godless world. How did that shape their last poems?
Vendler finds a turning point bewteen Stevens writing in the early fifties and Lowell writing in the mid seventies:
"The enormous difference in tone between Stevens' ornate murmuring farewells and Lowell's acute and worldly images - an art-nouveau church window, an nightmare of being swallowed alive, Cousin Belle's sofa, cardinals in flight, a family photograph - testifies to the major change in the elegiac vocabulary of American poetry brought about by Robert Lowell."
I think this mirrors society, which Vendler doesn't mention. Most strikingly the departure from the traditional Latin Mass to the Norvos Ordo in the Catholic Church. The same mistake the church made is the same mistake poetry made. Both abandoned a vocabulary of imagery collectively built and validated over millennium. Works of art that strike at the root of the collective consciousness exchanged for the new and avante garde. What's new today is old tomorrow and there is nothing new under the sun. The later poets don't match Stevens and Plath's death facing poems.
Vendler' s chapter on Plath was the best. Her insight on Plath is also her most pithy conclusion:
"She was always a posthumous person, but it took her years to acquire a posthumous style."
Vendler is a distinguished Harvard professor and frequent reviewer of poetry for the New York Review of Books and other high brow publications. Her book has an academic voice. What was more difficult is how she jumps from poem to poem. This required me to go back and read the poem again because she does some close but brief textual analysis. So the book is only 140 pages but its slow reading because of the academic verbosity and many peoms examined.
Vendler doesn't explain in the opening chapter why she chose these five poets or why she's writing it. She also doesn't conclude and bring it together. I understood the progression from Stevens to Lowell but why Bishopn and Merrill? To prove that elegiac poetry changed after Lowell? Bishop's abilities faded with age and she didn't write facing death, like Merrill who had AIDS and Stevens who had cancer and Plath who had been trying to kill herself since she was ten.
Vendler also comes off as snooty. Plath wrote a sonnet that was in 2 meters instead of 5 and Venlder feels the need to put quotes around sonnet to signify that it is not a proper sonnet. This attitude is why people don't read poetry. Again she objects to Lowell's prose like poem and calls it barely respectable poetry. What is respectable poetry? How about Bukowski or Dylan?
Evidently, departure from traditional vocabulary is good but departure from traditional form is bad. I thought form follows function and tail shouldn't wag the dog.
mariegauthier's review against another edition
3.0
Little disappointing. Wish she would have wondered a little further afield from her narrow microscope of a premise.
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