Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays

"In this posthumous gift to poetry lovers, one of our foremost poetry critics revisits the work of a wide range of American, English, and Irish poets--from John Donne to Marianne Moore to Ocean Vuong--in thirteen insightful essays. Helen Vendler approaches each of her subjects through the lens of a single poem, inhabiting it, living completely within its world, to uncover its rich emotional life. The essays gathered here were published in Liberties magazine during the last three years of Vendler's life, and were intended as her final book. The author's preface--completed only three days before her death, at age ninety--serves as a summation of her thoughts on poetry and poetry crticism. Whether reflecting on a Black poet's interest in creating the mind and language of an extraterrestrial (Robert Hayden), on the poetics of motherhood (Slyvia Plath), on the first PTSD poem (Walt Whitman), or on a literary conundrum *why, of the many poems known to her, Emily Dickinson requested on her deathbed that Emily Brontë's 'No coward soul is mine' be read at her funeral), Vendler demonstrates why the Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney called her 'the best close reader of poems to be found on the literary pages.' This farewell volume is further testament to Vendler's remarkable ability to get to the heart of a poem, to reveal the mind of the poet in the act of creation, and to show us exactly why and how poetry matters" -- Book jacket flap.