Bibliograph

Last looks, last books, Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill, Helen Vendler

Type

Label

Last looks, last books, Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill, Helen Vendler

Language

eng

Bibliography note

Includes bibliographical references

Index

no index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

Last looks, last books

Nature of contents

dictionariesbibliography

Oclc number

609873756

Responsibility statement

Helen Vendler

Series statement

Bollingen series, The A.W. Mellon lectures in the fine arts, 35:56., 2007

Sub title

Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill

Summary

In Last Looks, Last Books, the eminent critic Helen Vendler examines the ways in which five great modern American poets, writing their final books, try to find a style that does justice to life and death alike. With traditional religious consolations no longer available to them, these poets must invent new ways to express the crisis of death, as well as the paradoxical coexistence of a declining body and an undiminished consciousness. In The Rock, Wallace Stevens writes simultaneous narratives of winter and spring; in Ariel, Sylvia Plath sustains melodrama in cool formality; and in Day by Day, Robert Lowell subtracts from plenitude. In Geography III, Elizabeth Bishop is both caught and freed, while James Merrill, in A Scattering of Salts, creates a series of self-portraits as he dies, representing himself by such things as a Christmas tree, human tissue on a laboratory slide, and the evening/morning star. The solution for one poet will not serve for another; each must invent a bridge from an old style to a new one. Casting a last look at life as they contemplate death, these modern writers enrich the resources of lyric poetry

Target audience

adult

Classification

Contributor