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Table of Contents

*Indicates new to the 3rd edition
Preface: About This Book
Brief Contents
Contents
About Poets and Poetry

PART I. AN INTRODUCTION TO POETRY

1. The Poem as Life
The Private Life
William Blake, Infant Sorrow
Louise Glück, The School Children
E. E. Cummings, in Just-
*Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays
Walt Whitman, Hours Continuing Long
Wallace Stevens, The Plain Sense of Things

The Public Life
Michael S. Harper, American History
Charles Simic, Old Couple
Robert Lowell, Skunk Hour

Nature and Time
Anonymous, The Cuckoo Song
Dave Smith, The Spring Poem
John Keats, The Human Seasons
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 60 (Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore)

In Brief: The Poem as Life
Reading Other Poems
Sir Thomas Wyatt, They Flee from Me
Ben Jonson, On My First Son
John Milton, On the Late Massacre in Piedmont
John Keats, When I have fears that I may cease to be
Emily Dickinson, A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Langston Hughes, Theme for English B
Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
Sylvia Plath, Daddy
Yusef Komunyakaa, Facing It
Julia Alvarez, Homecoming

2. The Poem as Arranged Life
The Private Life
William Blake, Infant Joy
William Blake, Infant Sorrow
Louise Glück, The School Children
E. E. Cummings, in Just-
Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays
Walt Whitman, Hours Continuing Long
Wallace Stevens, The Plain Sense of Things

The Public Life
Michael S. Harper, American History
Charles Simic, Old Couple
Robert Lowell, Skunk Hour

Nature and Time
Anonymous, The Cuckoo Song
Dave Smith, The Spring Poem
John Keats, The Human Seasons
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 60 (Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore)

In Brief: The Poem as Arranged Life
Reading Other Poems
Anonymous, Lord Randal
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29 (When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes)
Chidiock Tichborne, Tichborne's Elegy
John Donne, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
Robert Herrick, Upon Julia's Clothes
George Herbert, Love (III)
Walt Whitman, A Noiseless Patient Spider
Thomas Hardy, The Convergence of the Twain
Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken
Marilyn Nelson, Live Jazz, Franklin Park Zoo

3. Poems as Pleasure
Rhythm

Rhyme
Ben Jonson, On Gut

Structure
William Carlos Williams, Poem
Gwendolyn Brooks, We Real Cool

Images
William Blake, London

Argument
Christopher Marlowe, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Walter Ralegh, The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd

Poignancy
William Wordsworth, A slumber did my spirit seal

Wisdom

A New Language

Finding Yourself

In Brief: Poems as Pleasure

Reading Other Poems
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 130 (My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun)
Robert Herrick, To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
William Blake, The Sick Rose
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty
Thomas Hardy, The Darkling Thrush
Robert Frost, After Apple-Picking
D.H. Lawrence, Snake
Theodore Roethke, My Papa's Waltz
Derek Walcott, The Season of Phantasmal Peace
Elizabeth Alexander, Nineteen

4. Describing Poems

Poetic Kinds
Narrative versus Lyric; Narrative as Lyric
Adrienne Rich, Necessities of Life
Philip Larkin, Talking in Bed

Classifying Lyric Poems

Content Genres
Emily Dickinson, The Heart asks Pleasure — first —

Speech Acts
Carl Sandburg, Grass

Outer Form
Line Width
Rhythm
Poem Length
Combinatorial Form Names

Inner Structural Form
Sentences
Robert Herrick, The Argument of His Book
Person
Agency
Randall Jarrell, The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
Tenses
William Wordsworth, A slumber did my spirit seal
Images, or Sensuous Words
Sylvia Plath, Metaphors

Exploring a Poem

John Keats, Upon First Looking into Chapman's Homer
1. Meaning
2. Antecedent Scenario ("Backstory")
3. A Division into Structural Parts
4. The Climax
5. The Other Parts
6. Find the Skeleton
7. Games the Poet Plays with the Skeleton
8. Language
9. Tone
10. Agency and Speech Acts
11. Roads Not Taken
12. Genre, Form, and Rhythm
13. The Imagination

In Brief: Describing Poems

Reading Other Poems
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 129 (Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame)
George Herbert, Easter Wings
John Milton, When I Consider How My Light is Spent
Anne Bradstreet, To My Dear and Loving Husband
John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale
Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach
Robert Frost, Mending Wall
Seamus Heaney, From the Frontier of Writing
Jorie Graham, San Sepolcro
Sherman Alexie, Evolution

5. The Play of Language

Sound Units

Word Roots

Words

Sentences
Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Emily Dickinson, The Heart asks Pleasure — first —

Implication

The Ordering of Language
George Herbert, Prayer (I)
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 66 (Tired with all these, for restful death I cry)
Michael Drayton, Since there's no help

In Brief: The Play of Language

Reading Other Poems
John Donne, Holy Sonnet 14 (Batter my heart, three-personed God; for You)
John Keats, To Autumn
Robert Browning, My Last Duchess
William Butler Yeats, The Wild Swans at Coole
Wallace Stevens, The Emperor of Ice-Cream
E.E. Cummings, r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
Elizabeth Bishop, One Art
Joy Harjo, Song for Deer and Myself to Return On
Lorna Dee Cervantes, Poema para los Californios Muertos

6. Constructing a Self

Multiple Aspects

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 30 (When to the sessions of sweet silent thought)

Change of Discourse

Space and Time
Seamus Heaney, Mid-Term Break

Testimony

Motivations

Typicality

Tone as a Marker of Selfhood
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall

Imagination
Emily Dickinson, I heard a Fly buzz — when I died —

Persona
William Butler Yeats, Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop

In Brief: Constructing a Self

Reading Other Poems
John Dryden, Sylvia the Fair
Walt Whitman, I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing
Emily Dickinson, I'm Nobody! Who are you?
William Butler Yeats, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
Thomas Hardy, The Ruined Maid
T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Countee Cullen, Heritage
Charles Wright, Self-Portrait
Carl Phillips, Africa Says

7. Poetry and Social Identity
Adrienne Rich, Mother-in-Law
Adrienne Rich, Prospective Immigrants Please Note
Langston Hughes, Genius Child
Langston Hughes, Me and the Mule
Langston Hughes, High to Low
Seamus Heaney, Terminus

In Brief: Poetry and Social Identity

Reading Other Poems
Robert Southwell, The Burning Babe
Thomas Nashe, A Litany in Time of Plague
Anne Bradstreet, A Letter to Her Husband Absent Upon Public Employment
William Blake, The Little Black Boy
Edward Lear, How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Felix Randal
David Mura, An Argument: On 1942
Rita Dove, Wingfoot Lake
Sheila Ortiz Taylor, The Way Back

8. History and Regionality
William Wordsworth, A slumber did my spirit seal

History
Robert Lowell, The March 1
Langston Hughes, World War II
Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est

Regionality
Sherman Alexie, On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City
William Wordsworth, Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

In Brief: History and Regionality

Reading Other Poems
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
William Wordsworth, Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
Wallace Stevens, Anecdote of the Jar
Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead
Robert Hayden, Night, Death, Mississippi
W.S. Merwin, The Asians Dying
Derek Walcott, The Gulf
Jorie Graham, What the End Is For
Silvia Curbelo, Balsero Singing
Dionisio Martinez, History as a Second Language

9. Attitudes, Values, Judgments
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 76 (Why is my verse so barren of new pride?)
Robert Lowell, Epilogue

In Brief: Attitudes, Values, Judgments

Reading Other Poems
Ben Jonson, Still to Be Neat
Richard Lovelace, To Lucasta, Going to the Wars
Phillis Wheatley, On Being Brought from Africa to America
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, How Do I Love Thee?
Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
Robert Frost, The Gift Outright
Allen Ginsberg, Sunflower Sutra
Louise Glück, Mock Orange

10. Writing about Poems

Basic Principles

A Brief Example
Robert Herrick, Divination by a Daffodil

A Longer Example:
William Wordsworth, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

Getting it Down on Paper
Begin with a Question
Present Your Case
Draw Your Conclusions

Keeping Your Readers in Mind
A Note on Writing about Unrhymed Poems

Organizing Your Paper
A Note on Well-Ordered Paragraphs

Checking Your Work

11. Studying Groups of Poems

Walt Whitman: Poems on Lincoln
Walt Whitman, Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day
Walt Whitman, O Captain! My Captain!
Walt Whitman, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
Walt Whitman, This Dust Was Once the Man

Emily Dickinson: Poems on Time
Emily Dickinson, I like to see it lap the Miles—
Emily Dickinson, Because I could not stop for Death—
Emily Dickinson, The Heart asks Pleasure—first—
Emily Dickinson, I felt a Cleaving in my Mind
Emily Dickinson, The first Day's Night had come—
Emily Dickinson,  After great pain, a formal feeling comes
Emily Dickinson, There's a certain Slant of light
Emily Dickinson, Pain-expands the Time

Writing Your Paper

PART II: ANTHOLOGY
Sherman Alexie, Reservation Love Song
Paula Gunn Allen, Zen Americana
A.R. Ammons, The City Limits
Anonymous, Western Wind
John Ashbery, Paradoxes and Oxymorons
W.H. Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts
John Berryman, from Dream Songs
         4 (Filling her compact & delicious body)
         384 (The marker slants, flowerless, day’s almost done)
*Frank Bidart, To My Father
Elizabeth Bishop, Poem
Elizabeth Bishop, Sestina
William Blake, Ah Sun-flower
William Blake, The Garden of Love
William Blake, The Lamb
William Blake, The Tyger
Anne Bradstreet, Before the Birth of One of Her Children
Lucie Brock-Broido, Domestic Mysticism
Emily Brontë, Remembrance
Gwendolyn Brooks, The Bean Eaters
Robert Burns, A Red, Red Rose
George Gordon Lord Byron, When We Two Parted
*Victoria Chang, $4.99 All You Can Eat Sunday Brunch
*Lucille Clifton, the lost baby poem
Henri Cole, 40 Days and 40 Nights
*Eduardo C. Corral, Monologue of a Vulture’s Shadow
William Cowper, Epitaph on a Hare
Hart Crane, To Brooklyn Bridge
Countee Cullen, Incident
Emily Dickinson, I like a look of Agony
Emily Dickinson, Much Madness is divinest Sense—
Emily Dickinson, Safe in their Alabaster Chambers— (1859)
Emily Dickinson, Safe in their Alabaster Chambers— (1861)
Emily Dickinson, The Soul selects her own Society—
Emily Dickinson, There’s a certain Slant of light
*John Donne, Breake of day
John Donne, Death, be not proud
Paul Laurence Dunbar, Harriet Beecher Stowe
Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert Gould Shaw
Paul Laurence Dunbar, We Wear the Mask
Thomas Sayers Ellis, View of the Library of Congress from Paul Laurence Dunbar High School
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Concord Hymn
Louise Erdrich, The Strange People
*Mark Ford, The Long Man
Robert Frost, Birches
Robert Frost, Design
Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Thom Gunn, The Man with Night Sweats
Michael S. Harper, We Assume: On the Death of Our Son, Reuben Masai Harper
*Terrance Hayes, Woofer (When I Consider the African-American)
Gerard Manley Hopkins, God’s Grandeur
Gerard Manley Hopkins, No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief
A.E. Housman, Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now
Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues
John Keats, In drear-nighted December
John Keats, La Belle Dam sans Merci
John Keats, On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again
*Jane Kenyon, Otherwise
Kenneth Koch, Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams
*Yusef Komunyakaa, The Towers
Philip Larkin, Reasons for Attendance
Philip Larkin, This Be the Verse
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Jewish Cemetery at Newport
Audre Lorde, Hanging Fire
Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress
Herman Melville, Monody
Marianne Moore, Poetry
Pat Mora, La Migra
*Harryette Mullen, Omnivore
Frank O’Hara, Why I Am Not a Painter
Wilred Owen, Anthem for Doomed Youth
Carl Phillips, Passing
Sylvia Plath, Morning Song
Ezra Pound, In a Station of the Metro
Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck
Alberto Ríos, Teodoro Luna’s Two Kisses
William Shakespeare, Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18 (Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?)
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias
Dave Smith, On a Field Trip at Fredericksburg
Stevie Smith, Not Waving but Drowning
*Tracy K. Smith, Credulity
Gary Snyder, Axe Handles
Edmund Spenser, Sonnet 75 (one day I wrote her name upon the strand)
Wallace Stevens, The Idea of Order at Key West
Wallace Stevens, The Planet on the Table
Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man
*Adrienne Su, The English Canon
*May Swenson, I Look at My Hand
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, From In Memoriam A.H.H.
         99 (Risest thou thus)
         121 (Sad Hesper o’er the buried sun)
Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill
*Natasha Trethewey, What Is Evidence
James Welch, Harlem, Montana: Just Off the Reservation
*Phillis Wheatley, To S.M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works.
Walt Whitman, From Song of Myself
         1 (I celebrate myself)
         6 (A child said What is the grass?)
         52 (The spotted hawk)
Walt Whitman, Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night
Richard Wilbur, Cottage Street, 1953
William Carlos Williams, Spring and All
William Carlos Williams, This Is Just to Say
William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality
James Wright, A Blessing
William Butler Yeats, Among School Children
William Butler Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree
William Butler Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium
William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

Appendices
1. On Prosody
2. On Grammar
3. On Speech Acts
4. On Rhetorical Devices
5. On Lyric Subgenres

Index of Authors, Titles, and First Lines

Index of Terms

Authors

Helen Vendler

Helen Vendler, critic and scholar of English-language poetry from the seventeenth century to the present, is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University–the first woman to hold a University Professorship, the highest academic distinction Harvard bestows. She was poetry critic of The New Yorker from 1978-1990, and was a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board from 1990-1999, often serving before those years on Pulitzer Prize juries for poetry.  She has written ground-breaking scholarly studies on the work of William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens, George Herbert, John Keats, William Shakespeare, Seamus Heaney, and Emily Dickinson, and has received the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Criticism in 1981, as well as the Truman Capote Prize, and the MLA Lowell Prize, and the APS Jefferson Medal. Her criticism has been collected in several volumes, including Part of Nature, Part of Us; The Music of What Happens; Soul Says; and The Ocean, The Bird, and The Scholar.

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