Argues that Keat's six odes form a sequence, identifies their major themes, and provides detailed interpretations of the poems' philosophy, mythological references, and lyric structures.

Though Wallace Stevens' shorter poems are perhaps his best known, his longer poems, Helen Hennessy Vendler suggests in this book, deserve equal fame and equal consideration. Stevens' central theme--the worth of the imagination--remained with him all his life, and Vendler therefore proposes that his development as a poet can best be seen, not in description--which must be repetitive--of the abstract bases of his work, but rather in a view of his changing...

"To find a personal style is, for a writer, to become adult; and to write one's first "perfect" poem - a poem that wholly and successfully embodies that style - is to come of age as a poet. By looking at the precedents, circumstances, and artistry of the first perfect poems composed by John Milton, John Keats, T.S. Eliot, and Sylvia Plath, Coming of Age as a Poet offers rare insight into this mysterious process, and into the indispensable period of...

"In this original and revealing book, the author analyzes twelve of Yeats' later plays, relating them to A Vision whose symbolism they share"--Cover.

To know the poetry of our time, to look through its lenses and filters, is to see our lives illuminated. In these eloquent essays on recent American, British, and Irish poetry, Helen Vendler shows us contemporary life and culture captured in lyric form by some of our most celebrated poets. An incomparable reader of poetry, Vendler explains its power; it is, she says, the voice of the soul rather than the socially marked self speaking directly to us...

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.

Companion to the PBS television series. Uses the works of thirteen poets to trace the development of an American poetic identity over the past two centuries.

A koala bear, a doll, and a mouse encounter adventure and danger when they climb into a picture on the wall in the nursery.