Style is the material body of lyric poetry, Helen Vendler suggests. To cast off an earlier style is to do an act of violence to the self. Why might a poet do this, adopting a sharply different form? In this exploration of three kinds of break in poetic style, Vendler clarifies the essential connection between style and substance in poetry. Opening fresh perspectives on the work of three very different poets, her masterful study of changes in style yields a new view of the interplay of moral, emotional, and intellectual forces in a poet's work.

Gerard Manley Hopkins' invention of sprung rhythm marks a dramatic break with his early style. Rhythm, Vendler shows us, is at the heart of Hopkins' aesthetic, and sprung rhythm is his symbol for danger, difference, and the shock of the beautiful. In Seamus Heaney's work, she identifies clear shifts in grammatical "atmosphere" from one poem to the next--from "nounness" to the "betweenness" of an adverbial style--shifts whose moral and political implications come under scrutiny here. And finally Vendler looks at Jorie Graham's departure from short lines to numbered lines to squared long lines of sentences, marking a move from deliberation to cinematic "freeze-framing" to coverage, each with its own meaning in this poet's career.

Throughout, Vendler reminds us that what distinguishes successful poetry is a mastery of language at all levels--including the rhythmic, the grammatical, and the graphic. A fine study of three poets and a superb exposition of the craft of poetry, The Breaking of Style revives our lapsed sense of what style means.

Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem "Among School Children". View her insightful and passionate analysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course.

Photo of Helen Vendler: Mary Lee

Helen Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.

Read More by Helen Vendler:

• Seamus Heaney
• The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets
• On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems
• The Odes of John Keats
• Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets
• Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of Desire
• John Keats: Poetry Manuscripts at Harvard, a Facsimile Edition
• The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition
• The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics
• Soul Says: On Recent Poetry
• The Poetry of George Herbert
• Coming of Age as a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath
• Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats
• Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form
• John Keats 1795-1995: With a catalogue of the Harvard Keats Collection
• Imagination and <i>Logos</i>: Essays on C. P. Cavafy