Introduction 1. John Milton--The Elements of Happiness 2. John Keats--Perfecting the Sonnet 3. T. S. Eliot--Inventing Prufrock 4. Sylvia Plath--Reconstructing the Colossus Notes Credits Index
Helen Vendler was Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor, Emerita, at Harvard University.
Helen Vendler begins her brief study with a persuasive and
delightful piece on the young Milton… [She] is brilliant on Keat’s
comparatively slow but sure practicing on the Petrarchan model… She
is equally good, by contrast, on the gradual evolution of Eliot’s
‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’… [This book is] full of
perceptions and rewards that send one scurrying back to the
text.
*New York Review of Books*
A clear but subtle account of the struggles, the rites of passage,
undergone by four poets, while still in their 20s, negotiating with
tradition in order to find their style and attain their majority—to
become, in fact, major poets… Each chapter becomes a short story, a
thrillingly compressed account of the vicissitudes of genius… It is
a pleasure to be guided by [Vendler] into the poet’s workshop—she
is so good at making poetry matter, at opening up the interest of
passages one had dully taken for granted.
*The Guardian*
[Vendler] has offered up a brief but profound inspiration to any
reader willing to take the time to move slowly, with curiosity and
attention, through her investigation of four cases of great
poetry.
*Bloomsbury Review*
[Vendler’s] attention to the psychological and aesthetic unraveling
of the poet’s calling turns the microscopic into the majestic.
*Boston Review*
Reading a Vendler essay is like coming home to the cave; like
entering the mind of the poet. In Coming of Age as a Poet, a
collection of four essays, Vendler looks at the point in the lives
of four poets…when they came into their own maturity as poets,
found their discourses, the styles and the voices that would make
them immortal… Vendler shows them on their vulnerable ascents to
greatness.
*Los Angeles Times Book Review*
Where does a poet’s voice come from and of what is it forged?
There’s a question to bring out bootless reductionism if ever there
was one, yet Helen Vendler explores it magnificently in its
complexity and nuance in Coming of Age as a Poet.
*Boston Sunday Globe*
Using Milton, Keats, Eliot and Plath as her case studies, Ms.
Vendler ‘consider[s] the work a young poet has to have done before
writing his or her first ‘perfect poem’—the poem which first wholly
succeeds in embodying a coherent personal style.’ This is a bold
claim and a challenging book, but Ms. Vendler succeeds brilliantly
in keeping us hooked. By the end we are better readers.
*Dallas Morning News*
Helen Vendler is an invaluable presence in current literary studies
because she knows that poems matter less for their thought than for
their thinking—less, that is, for the ideological stances, usually
familiar, that they adopt than for the processes of thinking and
feeling and reacting that they re-create in us… She knows that ‘it
is the writing that gives the theme life’, and that ‘a writer’s
true “vision” lies in the implications of his or her style.’ Rather
than reducing poems to grist for the dark mills of ideology or
theory, or getting the better of them by showing what she can do
with them, she seeks to ‘evaluate’ them by drawing out their human
significance. The case presented in Coming of Age as a Poet is
straightforward: she sets the first ‘perfect’ poem by each of her
four poets—‘the poem which first wholly succeeds in embodying a
coherent personal style’—against their earlier attempts.
*Milton Quarterly*
As to books about poetry, you could hardly do better than Coming of
Age as a Poet by superb U.S. critic Helen Vendler, in which she
illuminates the first perfect poems by John Milton, John Keats, T.
S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath. If in doubt about your critical
criteria, read Vendler.
*Weekend Australian*
This succinct but wide-ranging book, which began life as the James
Murray Brown Lectures at the University of Aberdeen, looks to the
early work of a number of poets in order to understand their
individual quests for a personal style, for a voice or voices, and
for a place in the world.
*Year’s Work in English Studies*
Though modest in size, Coming of Age contains numerous original
insights into the creative process, especially into that formative
period in which a poet finds his or her technique, style, and
voice.
*Choice*
In Coming of Age as a Poet, Vendler…chooses one breakthrough poem
by each of four poets—Milton, Keats, Eliot, and Plath. Through
close readings of their structure, imagery, and scansion, she shows
how these poems mark each poet’s mastery of a unique voice… The
clarity and expert analysis of all four poems could engage even a
casual reader, while the breadth of scholarship and unique
interpretations will appeal to more experienced poetry readers.
Vendler’s work is highly recommended.
*Library Journal*
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