| PODCASTS/BOOK: FIFTY-SIXTH A. W. MELLON LECTURES IN THE FINE ARTS | | |
|  PODCASTS: Last Looks, Last Books: The Binocular Poetry of Death
Helen Vendler, A. Kingsley Porter University Professor, Harvard University
Originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art in 2007, this six-part lecture series considers the final works of five modern American poets, as they "take the last look"—reconciling the interface of life and death, without the promise of an afterlife.
Poems in Order of Quotation | Copyright Credits
Introduction: Sustaining a Double View
Listen | iTunes | RSS (57:25 mins.)
Facing the Worst: Wallace Stevens, "The Rock"
Listen | iTunes | RSS (60:21 mins.)
The Contest of Melodrama and Restraint: Sylvia Plath, "Ariel"
Listen | iTunes | RSS (57:31 mins.)
Death by Subtraction: Robert Lowell, "Day by Day"
Listen | iTunes | RSS (56:06 mins.)
Caught and Freed: Elizabeth Bishop, "Geography III"
Listen | iTunes | RSS (57:10 mins.)
Self-Portraits While Dying: James Merrill, "A Scattering of Salts"
Listen | iTunes | RSS (59:43 mins.)
www.nga.gov/podcasts/mellon/#2007 (podcast series)
www.nga.gov/podcasts/mellon/vendler.htm (poems in order of quotation)
www.nga.gov/podcasts/mellon/vendler.htm#copyrightcredits (copyright credits)
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| | |  |  BOOK: Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill
Helen Vendler, A. Kingsley Porter University Professor, Harvard University
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.
Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series XXXV: 56
Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington
176 pages, $19.95
shop.nga.gov/nga/category.cgi?item=410000365397 (book) |
| | | | Helen Vendler is the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, where she received her PhD in English and American literature in 1960 after earning an undergraduate degree in chemistry at Emmanuel College, Boston. Before coming to Harvard, she taught at Cornell University, Swarthmore College, Haverford College, Smith College, and Boston University. She has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, and fellowships from the American Philosophical Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Dr. Vendler is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Swedish Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Modern Language Association (of which she was president in 1980). She holds 23 honorary degrees from universities and colleges in the United States and in the United Kingdom (Cambridge), Ireland (National University of Ireland and Trinity College) and Norway (Oslo). She has written books on William Shakespeare, George Herbert, John Keats, William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Seamus Heaney, and Emily Dickinson, all published with Harvard University Press. In 2011, her A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, delivered at the National Gallery of Art in 2007, were published as the book Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill. Dr. Vendler also reviews contemporary poetry for The New Republic, the London Review of Books, and other journals, and lectures widely in the United States and abroad. |
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