Dickinson

Selected Poems and Commentaries
Erscheinungsjahr 2012
ISBN: 978-0-674-06638-0
Verlag: Harvard University Press

Buch, Englisch, 560 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 233 mm, Gewicht: 733 g

“The best close reader of poems to be found on the literary pages.” —Seamus Heaney “[Vendler’s] succinct but astute readings of Emily Dickinson’s poetry are little kernels of insight into a wickedly keen poetic mind.” —Hillary Kelly, New Republic An interpretive introduction to Dickinson’s brilliant, enigmatic verse from the unrivaled doyenne of close reading. Seamus Heaney, Denis Donoghue, William Pritchard, Marilyn Butler, Harold Bloom, and many others have praised Helen Vendler as one of the best readers of our time. Here, Vendler applies her critical powers to 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson. As she did in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, she serves as an incomparable guide, illuminating both stylistic and imaginative features of the poems. Vendler’s selection highlights the astounding variety of Dickinson’s work, “from her first-person poems to the poems of grand abstraction, from her ecstatic verses to her unparalleled depictions of emotional numbness, from her comic anecdotes to her painful poems of aftermath.” In accompanying commentaries Vendler also acquaints us with Dickinson the writer, “the inventive conceiver and linguistic shaper of her perennial themes.” All of Dickinson’s preoccupations—death, religion, love, the natural world, the nature of thought—are explored here in detail, but Vendler always takes care to emphasize the poet’s startling imagination and the ingenuity of her linguistic invention. Whether exploring less-familiar poems or favorites we thought we knew, Vendler offers a unique window into Dickinson’s oeuvre—her incredible range, her unique path of poetic development, and her mastery of what Wordsworth called “the history and science of feeling.” Lucid and accessible, this will long remain an indispensable reference for students of Dickinson and readers of lyric poetry.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Vendler, Helen

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Lyrik und Dichter

Über Autor(innen)

Vendler, Helen
Helen Vendler (1933–2024) was a leading poetry critic and the author of nineteen books on poets from William Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney. A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, she contributed regularly to the <i>New Yorker</i>, the <i>New York Review of Books</i>, the <i>New York Times Book Review</i>, <i>London Review of Books</i>, and the <i>New Republic</i>. She was the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.