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(More customer reviews)I happened across this engrossing book by the Harvard professor, contemporary poetry critic Helen Hennessy Vendler, while researching the works of Walt Whitman, thinking t use it only as a revered reference, but then getting caught up in the writer's theses. This informative book it based on lectures delivered at Princeton and addressed the poets George Herbert, a 17th century poet of Godliness, the 19th century outspoken humanist Walt Whitman, and the contemporary esthete John Ashbery. Three quite different voices but each of whom Vendler sees as having a common thread: the need to find a profoundly personal intimacy with an invisible and 'imaginary' audience.
Herbert's poetry, she contends, is directed towards conversations with God, postulating verbal encounters between God and rebellious souls, and all the while yearning for his own ability to communicate with his fellowman on as intimate a level. And where Herbert was God-directed in his quest for intimacy, Whitman was man-directed, in the homoerotic sense, seeking intimacy in his poems about soldiers, patients of the Civil War hospitals, or the handsome vagabonds he encounters in his 'Song of Myself'. She compares Herbert's religious concerns with Whitman's democratic obsessions while showing with each the desperate need to communicate with that 'invisible audience'.
Vendler's thoughts on the poet John Ashbery are not as well gelled, and distance from his work in time may be the reason. Ashbery is indeed obtuse at times and it takes multiple readings to come to his level of thought. But in including Ashbery with Whitman and Herbert, Vendler acts as a champion for the degree of communication Ashbery establishes with his own invisible audience - the minds of the past - and narrow though that may be, it is a platform for placing ethics on the lyrical table.
It helps to have familiarity with the works of the discussed poets to fully appreciate Vendler's scholarship. An easy read this is not, but a worthy thesis is assuredly is. Grady Harp, November 05
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