The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics
Following The Harvard Book of Contemporary Poetry ( LJ 11/15/85), Vendler's hand-picked anthology of 20th-century American poets, this collection of recent essays gives us deeper insight into the poets Vendler admires. Vendler focuses on a work's uniqueness rather than its meaning or ideology. Like French critic Roland Barthes, she insists that pleasure motivates writers, and her own favorites (Stevens, Merrill, Ammons, Ashbery) prefer invention to social or psychological realism. Vendler sniffs out sloppy writing and overstatement with deadly accuracy: to a poet's claim that Anne Sexton suffered from "the problematic position of women," she asks: "Was it the problematic position of men . . . that created personal trouble in John Berryman's life?" Recommended for academic and large public libraries.Lisa Mullenneaux, Iowa City, Ia.Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.