Ocean the Bird and the Scholar

<p><b>One of [Vendler's] finest books an impressive summation of a long distinguished career.<br>--Charles Simic <i>New York Review of Books</i></b> <p/><b>A <i>Times Higher Education</i> Book of the Week.</b> <p/><b>A lively collection of the great critic's later work showcases her unswerving and deeply personal dedication to good poetry. </b> <p/>One of our foremost commentators on poetry examines the work of a broad range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English Irish and American poets. <i>The Ocean the Bird and the Scholar</i> gathers two decades' worth of Helen Vendler's essays book reviews and occasional prose--including the 2004 Jefferson Lecture--in a single volume. Taken together they serve as a reminder that if the arts and the patina of culture they cast over the world were deleted we would in Wallace Stevens's memorable formulation inhabit a geography of the dead. These essays also remind us that without the enthusiasm critiques and books of each century's scholars there would be imperfect perpetuation and transmission of culture. <p/>All of the modern poets who have long preoccupied Vendler--Wallace Stevens Seamus Heaney John Ashbery and Jorie Graham--are fully represented as well as others including Langston Hughes Allen Ginsberg Robert Lowell Elizabeth Bishop Amy Clampitt James Merrill A. R. Ammons and Mark Ford. And Vendler reaches back into the poetic tradition tracing the influence of Keats Yeats Whitman T. S. Eliot and others in the work of today's poets. As ever her readings help to clarify the imaginative novelty of poems giving us a rich sense not only of their formal aspects but also of the passions underlying their linguistic and structural invention. <i>The Ocean the Bird and the Scholar</i> is an eloquent plea for the centrality both in humanistic study and modern culture of poetry's beautiful subversive sustaining and demanding legacy.</p>