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.

To know the poetry of our time, to look through its lenses and filters, is to see our lives illuminated. In these eloquent essays on recent American, British, and Irish poetry, Helen Vendler shows us contemporary life and culture captured in lyric form by some of our most celebrated poets. An incomparable reader of poetry, Vendler explains its power; it is, she says, the voice of the soul rather than the socially marked self speaking directly to us through the stylization of verse. "Soul Says," the title of a poem by Jorie Graham, is thus the name of this collection. In essays on Seamus Heaney, Donald Davie, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Rita Dove, Jorie Graham, and others, Vendler makes difficult poetry accessible. She reveals the idiosyncratic nature of lyric form, and points out the artistic choices present in even the simplest texts. Vendler examines the use of abstraction in lyric poems; considers what readers seek and receive from verse; describes the role of such stylistic devices as compression, structural dynamics, and syntactic ordering; and renders a wide variety of poetic styles meaningful. Through her perceptive eyes we see how lyric poetry, speaking with natural musicality and rhythm, can by arrangement, pacing, metaphor, and tone create symbol from fact-and fill us with new understanding. In these direct and engaged commentaries, she explores the force, beauty, and intellectual complexity of contemporary lyric verse.

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 Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham
• The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition
• The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics
• 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