Coming of Age as a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath

by Helen Vendler

To find a personal style is, for a writer, to become adult; and to write one’s first “perfect” poem―a poem that wholly and successfully embodies that style―is to come of age as a poet. By looking at the precedents, circumstances, and artistry of the first perfect poems composed by John Milton, John Keats, T. S. Eliot, and Sylvia Plath, Coming of Age as a Poet offers rare insight into this mysterious process, and into the indispensable period of learning and experimentation that precedes such poetic achievement.

Milton’s L’Allegro , Keats’s On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer , Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock , and Plath’s The Colossus are the poems that Helen Vendler considers, exploring each as an accession to poetic confidence, mastery, and maturity. In meticulous and sympathetic readings of the poems, and with reference to earlier youthful compositions, she delineates the context and the terms of each poet’s self-discovery―and illuminates the private, intense, and ultimately heroic effort and endurance that precede the creation of any memorable poem.

With characteristic precision, authority, and grace, Vendler helps us to appreciate anew the conception and the practice of poetry, and to observe at first hand the living organism that breathes through the words of a great poem.

Genres: Poetry, Literary Criticism, Criticism

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Helen Vendler is the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, where she received her PhD in English and American Literature in 1960. Before joining the Harvard faculty, Vendler taught at Cornell, Swarthmore, Haverford, Smith, and Boston University.



Vendler has written books on Yeats, Herbert, Keats, Stevens, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Heaney, and, most recently, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (2007), Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill (2010); Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries’ (2010); and The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry (2015). She also reviews contemporary poetry for the New Republic, London Review of Books, and other journals. She has held fellowships from, among others, the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Woodrow Wilson Center, and National Endowment for the Humanities, and is a member of the American Philosophical Society, American Academy of Arts and Letters, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Swedish Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Modern Language Association, of which she was president in 1980.

Reviews

[Yu-Tong Kuo]

L'Allegro, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and The Colossus.

/Keats

Give me a golden pen, and let me lean
On heap'd up flowers, in regions clear, and far;
Bring me a tablet whiter than a star,
/ On Leaving Some Friends at an Early Hour

And can I ever bid these joys farewell?
Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life,
Where I may find the agonies, the strife
Of human hearts.

/T. S. Eliot

You would love me because I should have strangled you
And because of my infamy;
And I should love you the more because I had mangled you
And because you were no longer beautiful
To anyone but me.
(March Hare, 78)

Do I know how I feel? Do I know what I think?
Let me take ink and paper, let me take pen and ink.
(March Hare, 80)

[Anna Abramowitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written for an audience already familiar with poetry. This text hugely increased my appreciation for the poems studied. All critical decisions were explained, and the analysis of the first "perfect poem" was a unique take that inspired me as a young adult.

[Sougeitu · Rating 4 out of 5]

一本優秀的講座論文集，有著此類論文集的特點：深邃但易懂，簡練而不簡單。本書對於已經對詩人之名作有一定理解的讀者而言更佳，探討了詩人的早期生活與其成名前的作品，使其形象與文學研究更為立體。而另一點也由本書譯者點出：哪怕是被認為英年早逝的詩人，亦花費巨大心力進行了嘗試與磨練方練就文學名作。而這些他們“未成年”使其的作品，亦值得被深度探討與研究。

[Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really like Vendler's writing, it is clear and engaging and I always get the gist of what she is saying even when I don't understand all the technical details. I also find her focus on close reading of individual poems very appealing.

I enjoyed all of these essays but to my surprise the ones on Keats and Eliot (which focused on two of my favorite poems) were my least favorite, maybe there was just less scope for surprise because these poems are so familiar. I was also surprised at how much I liked the Milton essay. I'm not a big fan of Milton, I'd never read L'Allegro before and I kind of expected this essay to be hard and boring but after reading it I actually like the poem.

The Plath essay was my favorite though, not only did it help me appreciate a poem I didn't like that much before (The Colossus) but it also articulated for me what I find appealing about Plath's poetry in general. It's not the sensational confessional details and suicidal angst that make her poetry remarkable(plenty of bad poets offer those all the time) but her wry impertinent voice and her masterful use of linguistic structure and metaphor that make her poems stick in my mind.

Looking forward to reading Vendler's new Emily Dickinson book even more after this!

[Mitchell · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting set of essays showing how for famous poets work up to their first perfect, in Vendler's term, poem. L'allegro by Milton, On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer by Keats, The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock by Eliot and The Colossus by Plath are the examples she uses. The theory is that each poet needs to experiment with different vocabularies and subjects before deciding on his or her own voice. By Plath working through the style and language of Lowell and Dylan Thomas she arrives at what is unique in her own voice.

I found the sections on Milton and Keats most interesting, the section on Eliot and Plath less so, probably because they are less appealling to me. Sue me.

[Leanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

To be perfectly honest, I only read the Eliot and Plath chapters (was I too lazy to read the Milton and Keats chapters? Do I find their poetry not relevant to my own? Who knows).

It was interesting to read earlier work by Eliot and Plath, and to have Vendler compare that work to their later first "perfect" poems ("Prufrock" and "Colussus," respectively). (By "perfect" she means the first time the poet's voice really coheres.) Cool to see shakier, less confident versions of themes that both would continue to address throughout their careers.

Vendler also has some nice language about how writing poetry corresponds to finding symbolic equivalents for real life.

[David Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Helen Vendler is my favorite critic. More acute than Sven Birkerts and less egotistical than Harold Bloom. Literature may be classified in the arts but the tangible and direct way Vendler explains makes one think it can be as hard a physics. A must read for anyone wanting to cultivate an aesthetic

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, if at times common-knowledge examination of the maturation of style.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

you got to love Helen Vendler: It is precisely because L'Allegro and Il Penseroso have always been treated together that I want to separate them.