{"product_id":"9780674654761-part-of-nature-part-of-us","title":"Part of Nature, Part of Us","description":"\u003cmeta content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\" http-equiv=\"Content-Type\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eModern American Poets\u003cbr\u003eIn a compilation of essays and reviews written for the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e and other outlets during the 1960s and 1970s, Helen Vendler offers a dazzling retrospective of the authors who defined twentieth-century American poetry, including T. S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich, and Elizabeth Bishop.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e“Vendler sparkles.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Irvin Ehrenpreis, \u003ci\u003eNew York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAmerica’s foremost critic savors the poetry that made—and remade—our twentieth-century canon.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe American poet Randall Jarrell once defined the ideal critic as “an extremely good reader—one who has learned to show to others what he saw in what he read.” By this measure, Helen Vendler is the best of her generation. Never doctrinaire or merely academic, she is an evangelist for poetic truth, guiding readers along the tracks of her own authoritative readings to disclose the interplay of form, feeling, and perception that defines each poet’s idiosyncratic vision of the world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA compilation of essays and reviews written for the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e and other outlets,\u003ci\u003e Part of Nature, Part of Us\u003c\/i\u003e is a dazzling retrospective of the authors who defined midcentury American poetry. The work collected here, originally published in the late 1960s and 1970s, marks the first time that canonical modern poets like T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Sylvia Plath could be judged from a critical distance. Reviewing more recent poets—including Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich—Vendler also gives readers a chance to share in the “freshness of [her] first impressions.” Throughout, she is unforgiving but never unfair. She exults those who, like Lowell, show an essential fidelity to perception, who “say what happened” without stumbling into a mass of clichés. But she is unsparing with those who come to distrust their own emotions and retreat into clinical facticity, like the later Moore. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUnflinching, engrossing, and frequently poetic in its own right, \u003ci\u003ePart of Nature, Part of Us\u003c\/i\u003e confirms Vendler’s unmatched ability to pinpoint great poets’ value as thinkers, as artists, and, finally, as humans.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Rarewaves","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":41688054825057,"sku":"9780674654761","price":37.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0092\/7504\/8033\/files\/orig_41162966_bbadd7f6-da69-4b11-8ae9-d707091f4330.jpg?v=1778128394","url":"https:\/\/www.rarewaves.com\/products\/9780674654761-part-of-nature-part-of-us","provider":"Rarewaves.com","version":"1.0","type":"link"}