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Selected Poems and Commentaries
Harvard University Press
September 2010
On Sale: September 7, 2010
560 pages
ISBN: 0674048679
EAN: 9780674048676
Hardcover
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Fiction Poetry
Seamus Heaney, Denis Donoghue, William Pritchard, Marilyn
Butler, Harold Bloom, and many others have praised Helen
Vendler as one of the most attentive readers of poetry.
Here, Vendler turns her illuminating skills as a critic to
150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson. As she did in The Art
of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, she serves as an incomparable
guide, considering both stylistic and imaginative features
of the poems. In selecting these poems for commentary Vendler chooses to
exhibit many aspects of Dickinson’s work as a poet, “from
her first-person poems to the poems of grand abstraction,
from her ecstatic verses to her unparalleled depictions of
emotional numbness, from her comic anecdotes to her painful
poems of aftermath.” Included here are many expected
favorites as well as more complex and less often
anthologized poems. Taken together, Vendler’s selection
reveals Emily Dickinson’s development as a poet, her
astonishing range, and her revelation of what Wordsworth
called “the history and science of feeling.” In accompanying commentaries Vendler offers a deeper
acquaintance with Dickinson the writer, “the inventive
conceiver and linguistic shaper of her perennial themes.”All
of Dickinson’s preoccupations—death, religion, love, the
natural world, the nature of thought—are explored here in
detail, but Vendler always takes care to emphasize the
poet’s startling imagination and the ingenuity of her
linguistic invention. Whether exploring less familiar poems
or favorites we thought we knew, Vendler reveals Dickinson
as “a master” of a revolutionary verse-language of immediacy
and power. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries will
be an indispensable reference work for students of Dickinson
and readers of lyric poetry.
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