Helen Vendler, a supreme partridge among American critics of poetry, has written a third shining book on style – which she has made her métier, rather after Theodor Adorno, the philosopher-critic of music and the aesthetic high road. In her first, The Breaking of Style (1995), about Hopkins, Heaney, and Graham, she revealed how poets ‘can cast off an earlier style to perform an act of violence on the self’ – extending mastery. Coming of Age as a Poet (2003) was about the mature self-making of Milton, Keats, Eliot and Plath. Both books delivered the pleasures to which we have become accustomed: the feeling that we are in the company of a most brilliant undresser of poems, a critic who knows their stitching so well that she can lay their song and soul truly bare. Her powers of elucidation, with its enshrining of techne, have long brought joy to poets and their readers.
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