Last Looks, Last Books, Helen Vendler, 2010

Vendler, The A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard, and one of America’s most noted poetry critics, has written a gem of a book in which she explores the work of five American poets who contemplated their impending deaths while keeping at least one eye firmly focused on their still vital lives and work.  Recognizing the loss of religious faith and its afterlife that sustained three 17^th C poets she references (Donne, Herbert, Edmund Waller), Vendler delves into the works of Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill to explore how they explored Stevens’ ‘mythology of modern death’ and specifically their own personal extinction.  She focuses on the concept of ‘binocular gaze’ that renders that ‘last look’ in a single poem’s symbolic system, style, form, and language that are materially confined but conceptually limitless.  In clear and crisp chapters, Vendler analyzes wonderful poems, some known to me, but many new ones, especially from Merrill’s A Scattering of Salts.  The book is the compilation of the National Gallery of Art’s Mellon Lectures from 2007.