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Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill

Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill

by Vendler, Helen
No customer reviews yet ISBN 9780691145341 Princeton University Press

Modern American poets writing in the face of death

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.

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Product details

BrandPrinceton University Press
Pub dateMar 21, 2010
ISBN-100691145342
ISBN-139780691145341
LanguageEnglish
Dimensions8.5 × 0.8 × 5.8 in
Weight1 lb
Last updated 2026-05-17 13:04
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