Coming of Age as a Poet

Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath
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 first perfect poems composed by Milton, Keats, Eliot, and Plath, Vendler offers rare insight into this mysterious process.

“Brilliant.full of perceptions and rewards that send one scurrying back to the text.” —John Bayley, New York Review of Books

The finest reader of her generation retraces four great poets’ first steps across the threshold of genius.

To find a personal style is, for a writer, to become an 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 learning and experimentation that precedes such poetic achievement.

Milton’s “L’Allegro,” Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and Plath’s “The Colossus” are the poems that Helen Vendler considers, exploring each as an accession to poetic confidence, mastery, and maturity. In meticulous and sympathetic readings of the poems, and with reference to earlier youthful compositions, she delineates the context and the terms of each poet’s self-discovery—illuminating the private, intense, and ultimately heroic effort and endurance that precede the creation of any memorable poem.

With characteristic precision, authority, and grace, Vendler helps us to appreciate anew the conception and the practice of poetry, and to observe firsthand the living organism that breathes through the lines of a great poem.

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