Godina izdanja: 1995
ISBN: 978-0674354326
Jezik: Engleski
Vrsta: Istorija svetske književnosti
Autor: Strani

The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition Paperback – September 15, 1995, by Helen Vendler (Author)
Product details
Paperback: 152 pages
Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.38 x 8.25 inches
Item Weight: 7.2 ounces
Publisher: Harvard University Press; First Edition (September 15, 1995)
Language: English
Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem `Among School Children`. View her insightful and passionate analysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course.

How does a poet repeatedly make art over a lifetime out of an arbitrary assignment of fate? By asking this question of the work of four American poets--two men of the postwar generation, two young women writing today--Helen Vendler suggests a fruitful way of looking at a poet`s career and a new way of understanding poetic strategies as both mastery of forms and forms of mastery.

Fate hands every poet certain unavoidable `givens.` Of the poets Vendler studies, Robert Lowell sprang from a family famous in American and especially New England history; John Berryman found himself an alcoholic manic-depressive; Rita Dove was born black; Jorie Graham grew up trilingual, with three words for every object. In Vendler`s readings, we see how these poets return again and again to the problems set out by their givens, and how each invents complex ways, both thematic and formal, of making poetry out of fate.

Compelling for its insights into the work of four notable poets, this book by a leading critic of poetry is also invaluable for what it has to tell us about the poetic process--about how art copes with the obdurate givens of life, and about the conflict in art between the whim of fate and the artist`s will to choose.
In a few provocative pages, Harvard professor and author of the NBCC winner Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets, once again demonstrates her talent for smart and sympathetic reading of poetry. She looks at four poets and their particular uses of a donnee (meaning theme but derived from the `given` of the title): for Robert Lowell, it is the persistent drive of history; for John Berryman, the mischievous and frightening id; for Rita Dove, the color of her skin; for the trilingual Jorie Graham, the problem of translating thought into language, into phenomenon. Almost all of the chapter on Berryman is devoted to his brilliant, funny and disturbing Dream Songs, while in Dove, Vendler follows differing, equally intriguing manipulations of her theme from `Parsley` to Thomas and Beulah and Grace Notes. Perhaps most interesting, because personal and poetical are so vividly intertwined, is her examination of Lowell. Vendler carefully outlines his changing interaction with history and its effect on his style, from the often overwrought public historical passions of The Mills of the Kavanaughs and the more intimate history and form that followed his parents` deaths and his own bout with manic depression. Although she occasionally gives in to the lure of such words as victimage and necessitarian, which tend to reflect dully on her usually lucid style, it`s a small thing in her subtle, beguiling essays.

Ima inventarski pečat, inače dobro očuvano.
KC