The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham - Couverture souple

Vendler, Helen Hennessy

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0674081218 ISBN 13 : 9780674081215

Editeur : Harvard University Press, 2005

Synopsis

"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.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Helen Vendler (1933-2024) was a leading poetry critic and the author of nineteen books on poets from William Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney. A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, she contributed regularly to the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, and the New Republic. She was the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Harvard University Press
• Date d'édition: 2005
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0674081218
• ISBN 13: 9780674081215
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 112
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Amazon EU Sarl; 0; www.amazon.com; ; 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxembourg