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Helen Vendler: Inhabit the Poem — Last Essays

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Overview

Video Helen Vendler’s Sixth Sense
December 3, 2025

Interviews | News “Putting the Poem First”: Stephanie Burt on the Towering Literary Legacy of Helen Vendler
October 17, 2025

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: A Journal of Culture and Politics 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 criticism. Whether reflecting on a Black poet’s interest in creating the mind and language of an extraterrestrial (Robert Hayden), on the poetics of motherhood (Sylvia 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.

Helen Vendler was the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University. Her many books include The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1997), Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries (2010), and The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar (2015). In 2004, she was selected by the National Endowment for the Humanities for the Jefferson Lecture, and, in 2023, she was awarded a Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

This special publication features full-cloth binding, acid-free paper, and a unique design with specifications differing from those of Library of America series titles.
Table of Contents

Loosed Quotes (W. B. Yeats)
The Enigmatical Beauty of Each Beautiful Enigma (Wallace Stevens)
Art and Anger (Adrienne Rich)
Strangering (Robert Hayden)
Art Against Stereotype (Marianne Moore)
How to Talk to God (John Donne)
The New Statue (Sylvia Plath)
The Selfless Self of Self (Gerald Manley Hopkins)
The Shaper (Ocean Vuong)
Artless Art (William Blake)
Forced to a Smile (William Cowper)
The Red Business: PTSD and the Poet (Walt Whitman)
Can Poetry Be Abstract? (Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson)

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-827-4 279 pages

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