270
ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews
The book is well-produced for the most part, with only a few misspellings
(“Catherine of Sienna” being one example) and a few passages that would have
profited from a heavier editorial hand. A comprehensive index would also be welcome as a way for readers, particularly students or beginners, to understand the
materials and themes in the collection as a whole.
As editor Kerby-Fulton points out, it is fitting that this memorial volume
should emphasize women as “preachers, teachers and visionaries” (ix) because of
Louis’ dedication, remembered by many of the contributors, to teaching and to an
opened canon of materials by and about women. The sense of community that is
evoked in this little book is as kind and gracious a memorial as any teacher could
desire.
S USAN YAGER
Iowa State University
VENDLER, Helen. Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop,
Merrill. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010, 176 pp.
Compiled from her talks as the presenter of the 2007Andrew W. Mellon
Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Helen
Vendler’s new book analyzes some important last poems by five major twentiethcentury American poets. Discussed here are works from Wallace Stevens’s The
Rock and Collected Poems, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, Robert Lowell’s Day by Day,
Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III and Edgar Allan Poe and the Jukebox, and
James Merrill’s Collected Poems. Practicing in her preferred mode of aesthetic
criticism, in Last Looks, Last Books Vendler examines the strategy her subjects adopt in meeting the stylistic challenge of what she calls a “binocular
vision,” that is, each poet’s “very late look at the interface at which death meets
life” (1).
Before devoting a chapter to each of the selected figures, Vendler establishes some key features of the context of modern American poetry by balancing representative poems by Stevens and Merrill—along with a poem by
their nineteenth-century countrywoman and fellow post-Darwinian poet Emily
Dickinson—against representative late poems of three of their seventeenthcentury British predecessors, Edmund Waller, George Herbert, and John Donne.
As Vendler points out, “Although death is a frequent theme in European literature,
Book Reviews
271
any response to it used to be fortified by the belief in a personal afterlife” (1–2).
Thus, according to Vendler’s assessment, “as the conviction of the soul’s afterlife
waned, poets had to invent what Wallace Stevens called ‘the mythology of modern death’” (2). Poets like Waller, Herbert, and Donne were generally able to face
down death in their poems by availing themselves of the escape hatch of immortality. Poets of the modern and postmodern eras, on the other hand, are forced to
adopt a different strategy, one of their own making, and, according to Vendler,
that strategy will necessarily engage issues of style. She asserts that the poet in
this situation, “still alive but aware of the imminence of death, wishes to enact
that deeply shadowed but still vividly alert moment” and therefore must negotiate
specific stylistic difficulties to “do justice to both the looming presence of death
and the unabated vitality of spirit” (1). Her analyses of individual poems set out
to describe exactly how the poet has balanced the two sides of the “binocular”
equation.
Perhaps Vendler’s best example of such a poem is the one by Wallace Stevens
she discusses in the introduction, “The Hermitage at the Center.” Vendler demonstrates how the piece requires a binocular vision even of its reader. Almost literally
two poems in one, the first lines of its first four tercets, when extracted from their
stanzas and recombined in succession, form a poem about death: the scraping
noise of dead leaves blown across pavement by a cold wind. The remaining two
lines of each tercet, extracted and recombined, form a poem about life: soft grass,
birds, sun, a woman referred to as “the desired.” In the final stanza, Stevens melds
the two themes in a way that well exemplifies the overall premise of Vendler’s
book:
And yet this end and this beginning are one,
And one last look at the ducks is a look
At lucent children round her in a ring. (4)
Vendler argues successfully about the poem—and thus about the nature of the
stylistic challenge all late-career modern poets face—that the “stress of approaching death” (2) forces on the poet such a radical stylistic approach as the one we
see here so as “to be equally fair to both life and death at once” (2).
Likewise, the Merrill poem she discusses in the introduction, “Christmas
Tree,” also takes a radical stylistic tack in that it is a shaped poem in the form
of a Christmas tree, or rather half of one, as its flush left margin perfectly bisects
the image. In Merrill’s hands, the Christmas tree, as Vendler explains, becomes an
emblem of life in death—and death in life—because, having been cut down, it is
no longer technically alive; yet, because of the lights, decorations, its being gazed
upon by the beaming faces of children, it seems even more alive than before it
272
ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews
was “Brought down at last / From the cold sighing mountain” (5). The half of the
image that has been excised becomes, symbolically, the death side of the equation, and thus Merrill’s poem represents a perfect merging of style and theme and
an excellent example of how one poet met the artistic challenge.
If the rest of the poems Vendler discusses in the book are less obvious as
examples of her premise, they still benefit from having readers consider them
in its light, which, in virtually every case, offers fresh illumination of the poem
in question. Moreover, Vendler identifies in each of the poets a distinct overall approach to the stylistic challenge, adding further nuance to our sense and
understanding of their art. Of Stevens, Vendler observes that, in addressing the
dual theme, he takes “a stance of formal argument” (26) in line with his training as a lawyer. Stevens had on occasion taken such an approach earlier in his
career, but Vendler points out how he picks it up now as the single approach
best suited to the demands of the binocular vision. Of Plath, she argues that the
poet’s entire career had involved a tension between “melodrama and restraint,”
and whereas in some of her earliest poems “formality encases her emotions” (47),
and in some of her famous later poems—“Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Ariel”—
she gives freedom to what Vendler calls “a theatricalizing melodrama” (47), in a
few of the last poems, especially “Berck-Plage,” the poet develops a new, mature
objectivity in meeting the stylistic challenge. Of Lowell, Vendler notes that his
poems in Day by Day focus on “images of subtraction”—things lost: friends,
loved ones, family life, his health and mental stability—and fittingly the style of
the poems is much sparer than those in his previous books, a sort of style by
subtraction. Of Bishop, she identifies a retreat into objectivity, the perspective
of a detached, third-person speaker, to negotiate the difficulties of the binocular view, demonstrating how the more personal first-person, almost confessional
approach of the failed poem “Breakfast Song”—which Bishop never chose to
publish but which is included in the posthumous collection Edgar Allan Poe and
the Jukebox—is replaced by the more distant and ultimately successful approach
of “Sonnet” (94–97). And of Merrill, Vendler identifies a movement toward selfportraiture as a way of addressing the stylistic challenge, finding in “Christmas
Tree,” for instance, such an example, since, dying of AIDS, Merrill, like a
Christmas tree, “knew—of course I knew— / That it would be only a matter of
weeks” (5).
Vendler’s analyses of individual poems feature the sort of close reading
and sensitivity to aesthetic detail for which she is well-known. She remarks of
Bishop’s “Sonnet,” for example, that there “is a an architectural solidity to this
poem, as it divides personhood into a period during which it is caught, and a
second period—with a longer number of lines—when it is freed” (97), the kind
of observation even careful readers of poetry are likely to find both surprising
Book Reviews
273
and exceedingly apt. Vendler is able to bring to the understanding of poems—
including ones readers may have felt they already knew well—flashes of insight
that enrich as they edify. Again, to use as an example her discussion of a famous
poem by Elizabeth Bishop, in this case “One Art,” she points out about one of
the villanelle’s repetons that the poet “means to invoke the etymological meaning
of the word ‘disaster,’ representing the moment when the stars themselves turn
irreversibly hostile” (108).
The chapter of the book that may seem least satisfying is the one focusing on
Plath. Vendler begins her discussion by alluding to a way the poet’s work is categorically unlike the others in that “she practiced taking the last look from the time
she began to write” (48); or, as Vendler states it earlier in that same paragraph,
“the fact of death, and death as a subject of expression, had preoccupied her from
the time she was eight, when her father died in a fashion inexplicable to a child”
(47). Surprisingly, however, Vendler makes no comment about another categorical difference in Plath, one that seems equally important to the book’s overall
focus: the fact that Plath “died a suicide at thirty” (47) means that her last looks,
whatever qualities they might have, could not be informed by the sheer quantity
of experience that informed the last looks of the other poets, all of whom died at
comparatively advanced ages. As Vendler herself must surely believe, a large part
of the profundity, poignancy, and perceived wisdom of late Stevens is the number of decades that preceded composition. Likewise, the other poets deliver their
last looks from a perspective only possible with age. Lowell, who died at sixty—
exactly twice the age of Plath at the time of her death—was the closest to Plath in
terms of the age at which he died, yet Vendler chooses not to qualify what she says
about Plath in this regard. Vendler finds in Plath’s last poems, especially “BerckPlage,” a greater maturity and a new-found objectivity in her poetic treatment of
death, and for these reasons Plath’s inclusion in the book is understandable. Still,
Vendler seems at times defensive on Plath’s behalf rather than fully objective, and
her failing to even mention this primary difference between Plath’s case and that
of the others seems, at the very least, a missed opportunity.
If the poems analyzed in Last Looks, Last Books represented what, only in
our hindsight, turned out to be the last work of these five preeminent modernist
American poets, the book’s focus on those poems would constitute a real strength.
That, as Vendler persuasively argues, the poets in fact seem to have known they
were writing their last poems provides for even greater strength, not to mention
poignancy. As she explains in the book’s first paragraphs, her title comes from an
ancient Irish tradition in which a person nearing death takes a “last look” at things
and places that have been important in his or her life. With this as the context, the
reader of these last poems comes to consider how their creators may be bearing
down on meaning in a new way. Among other things, to have these last poems
274
ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews
singled out allows us now to compare them to last poems by poets of other periods or nationalities—Yeats comes to mind; Wordsworth, Milosz—which should
provide some added definition to our understanding of both Americanism and
modernism. Vendler’s stylistic approach proves effective as a way to discuss them
all within the covers of a single, unified volume.
N ICK N ORWOOD
Columbus State University