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, this title offers insight into the mysterious process of coming of age as a poet.
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 com…
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. With traditional religious consolations no longer available to them, these poets must invent new ways to express the crisis o…
A memoir of the author's deep friendship at Smith and Harvard with the late Sylvia Plath, whose legend and following since her suicide have taken on increasing dimensions. Outwardly an All-American girl, inheritor of a century of"middle-class proprieties," Sylvia Plath lived a d…
