Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays

In 13 essays, the great poetry critic offers her final word on the poets who have meant the most to her, from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to Wallace Stevens and Sylvia Plath

Helen Vendler was our greatest reader of poetry, a scholar who illuminiated its inner mechanisms and emotional roots for a wide audience.

Always attentive to the stylistic and imaginative features of a poem, Vendler addresses the work of a wide range of American, English, and Irish poets—both the canonical and the unexpected—in 13 essays:

• Walt Whitman, author of the first PTSD poem
• Sylvia Plath, and the lost poetry of motherhood
• William Cowper, James Merrill, and A. R. Ammons on poetric charm
• Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson, linked by a poetic mystery
• Ocean Vuong and the shaping imagination of poetry today
• Wallace Stevens and the enigma of beauty.

In these and other essays Vendler demonstrates once again why the Irish poet Seamus Heaney called her “the best close reader of poems to be found on the literary pages.” The thirteen poignant essays gathered here were all published in the last three years of Vendler's life, in the journal Liberties, and intended as her final book. The author’s preface was completed only three days before her death, at age ninety.

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