Last Looks, Last Books Stevens, Plath, Loell, Bishop, Merrill [Hardcover]

InLast Looks, Last Books, the eminent critic Helen Vendler examines the ways in which five great modern American poets, writing their final books, try to find a style that does justice to life and death alike. With traditional religious consolations no longer available to them, these poets must invent new ways to express the crisis of death, as well as the paradoxical coexistence of a declining body and an undiminished consciousness. InThe Rock, Wallace Stevens writes simultaneous narratives of winter and spring; inAriel, Sylvia Plath sustains melodrama in cool formality; and inDay by Day, Robert Lowell subtracts from plenitude. InGeography III, Elizabeth Bishop is both caught and freed, while James Merrill, inA Scattering of Salts, creates a series of self-portraits as he dies, representing himself by such things as a Christmas tree, human tissue on a laboratory slide, and the evening/morning star. The solution for one poet will not serve for another; each must invent a bridge from an old style to a new one. Casting a last look at life as they contemplate death, these modern writers enrich the resources of lyric poetry.

"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2011"Helen Vendleris the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University. Her many books includeInvisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery(Princeton), as well as studies of Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats, Stevens, and Heaney. She is a frequent reviewer for theNew Republic, theNew York Review of Books, and other publications. Close reading of poems, especially for nonacademic audiences, is hard to find. This makes Helen Vendler'sLast Looks, Last Booksan attractive proposition. Vendler, long a tastemaker equally respected inside and outside the academy, wants to find out how her subjects 'do justice to both the looming presence of death and the unabated vitality of slÍ