The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry

In this triumphant collection, Vendler (Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries) reminds us why she is one of the most important living scholars of poetry. Although her renowned work has included several studies of Yeats and painstaking close readings of Shakespeare’s sonnets, most of the 27 essays showcased in this book are rooted in American soil. But the geographically grounded collection is anything but constricted: its essays, in their varied approaches, open up America’s haunting, startlingly alive poetic landscape. The first entry analyzes the Wallace Stevens poem “Somnabulisma,” the imagery of which inspired this book’s title, while later essays illuminate key poets like John Ashbery, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop, and Seamus Heaney. The most rewarding selection, however, may be the introduction, in which Vendler turns to her own history and experience as a scholar. Here her writing evinces the same sensitivity and sustained poetic focus that is, as the close readings in her essays show, so critical to her criticism. This book, with its oceans of depth, reminds us why we need poetry—as well as teachers like Vendler to bring it to transformative life. (May)