The Breaking of Style

Hopkins, Heaney, Graham
In her 1994 Richard Ellman lectures, eminent critic Helen Vendler explores the meaning and significance of major breaks in poetic style. Focusing on Gerard Manley Hopkins, Seamus Heaney, and Jorie Graham, she offers a new view of the interplay of moral, emotional, and intellectual forces in each poet’s work.

"Lucid and elegant.a tour de force."
—A. O. Scott, Nation

Three lectures on the fraught process of poetic development from a titan of contemporary criticism.

Style is the material body of lyric poetry. To cast off an earlier style is to commit an act of violence against the creative self. Why do poets so often make these dramatic breaks? In her 1994 Richard Ellman Lectures, Helen Vendler investigates poets’ motives for inventing a new voice, along with their means of doing so. Exploring three archetypal ruptures, she yields a new view of the interplay of moral, emotional, and intellectual forces in each poet’s work.

Gerard Manley Hopkins’s invention of sprung rhythm marks a radical break with his early style. Rhythm, Vendler shows us, is at the heart of Hopkins’s aesthetic, and sprung rhythm is his symbol for danger, difference, and the shock of the beautiful. In Seamus Heaney’s work, she identifies clear shifts in grammatical “atmosphere” from one poem to the next—from “nounness” to the “betweenness” of an adverbial style—shifts whose moral and political implications come under scrutiny here. And finally, Vendler looks at Jorie Graham’s departure from short lines to numbered lines to squared long lines of sentences, marking a move from “deliberation” to cinematic “freeze-framing” to “coverage,” each with its own meaning in this poet’s career.

Throughout, Vendler reminds us that what distinguishes successful poetry is a mastery of language at all levels—including the rhythmic, the grammatical, and the graphic. A lucid reading of three poets and a superb exposition of the craft of poetry, The Breaking of Style revives our lapsed sense of what style means.

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