This all-new Signet Classic contains many of T.S. Eliot's most important early poems, leading to perhaps his greatest masterpiece, The Waste land, which has long been regarded as one of the fundamental texts of modernism. By combining poetic elements from many diverse sources with bits of popular cu[...]

In Our Secret Discipline the distinguished critic Helen Vendler considers Yeats's lyric form. With elegance and precision, Vendler offers brilliant insights into the creative process, and speculates on Yeats's aims as he writes and rewrites some of the most famous poems in modern literature.[...]

Poetry has often been considered an irrational genre, more expressive than logical, more meditative than given to coherent argument. And yet, in each of the four very different poets she considers here, Helen Vendler reveals a style of thinking in operation; although they may prefer different means,[...]

Presents 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson along with commentary on both the stylistic and imaginative features of the poems.[...]

Helen Vendler widens her exploration of lyric poetry with a new assessment of the six great odes of John Keats and in the process gives us, implicitly, a reading of Keats's whole career. She proposes that these poems, usually read separately, are imperfectly seen unless seen together--that they form[...]

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. The poets nearest to us in time often seem the most remote and difficult. Helen Vendler closes[...]

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. To know the poetry of our time, to look through its lenses and filters, is to see our lives ill[...]

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 i[...]