Word: stevenses
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THERE'S AN ALMOST MAGICAL land of the imagination where poets congregate, shutting out the rest of the world. Occasionally, a poet invites a critic to this metaphysical enclave; Wallace Stevens has requested Helen Vendler's presence.
Reading Vendler's Part Of Nature, Part Of Us, a collection of the author's essays and reviews spanning 12 years, makes you feel as though this critic has some unique insight into modern poets and their work. Sometimes, it seems as if she's perched on the edge of...
Yet Vendler's intimacy with Stevens' mind does not prevent her from establishing highly personal and evocative relationships with many of the other poets in this collection. Reviews of such contemporary giants as Robert Lowell, W.H. Auden, and James Merrill demonstrate her awesome sense of poetic familiarity. Part Of Nature...
Vendler serves as the link between poet and audience; she listens for voices that sound like no one else, and then transmits them to her readers. In an essay on Stevens, entitled "Apollo's Harsher Songs," she isolates the poet's moments of brutality toward himself and his life "because...
The author focuses on one poet at a time, though her occasional allusions to others are not disconcerting but enhancing, for the most part. One of the few unsettling references in all of these reviews emerges in her long evaluation of Adrienne Rich's Diving Into the Wreck. In it...