Helen Vendler

The reader is invited on an apocalyptic journey into a desert waste. This essential volume contains Eliot's greatest work - some say the greatest work of all modernist literature - together with his compendium Prufrock and Other Observations, as well as Poems - twelve works including 'Gerontion'; 'Burbank with a Baedeker': 'Bleistein with a Cigar'; and 'A Cooking Egg'. --Publisher

This is a collection of previously published book reviews of modern poetry. The poets discussed include John Ashbery, Donald Davie, Allen Ginsberg, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Wallace Stevens.

Seamus Heaney, Denis Donoghue, William Pritchard, Marilyn Butler, Harold Bloom, and many others have praised Helen Vendler as one of the most attentive readers of poetry. Here, Vendler turns her illuminating skills as a critic to 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson. As she did in "The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets", she serves as an incomparable guide, considering both stylistic and imaginative features of the poems. In selecting these poems for...

"One of our foremost commentators on poetry examines the work of a broad range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English, Irish, and American poets. The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar 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,...