Last Lines: Essays on Poets and Poetry

In 13 essays, the great poetry critic offers her final word on the poems and poets who have meant the most to her, from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to Wallace Stevens and Sylvia Plath

Helen Vendler was our greatest reader of poetry, a scholar who illuminiated its inner mechanisms and emotional roots for a wide audience.

Always attentive to the stylistic and imaginative features of a poem, Vendler addresses the work of a wide range of American, English, and Irish poets--both the canonical and the unexpected--in 13 essays:

- Walt Whitman, author of the first PTSD poem
- Sylvia Plath, and the lost poetry of motherhood
- William Cowper, James Merrill, and A. R. Ammons on poetric charm
- Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson, linked by a poetic mystery
- Ocean Vuong and the shaping imagination of poetry today
- Wallace Stevens and the enigma of beauty.

In these and other essays Vendler demonstrates once again why the Irish poet Seamus Heaney called her ＂the best close reader of poems to be found on the literary pages.＂ The thirteen poignant essays gathered here were all published in the last three years of Vendler’s life, in Liberties magazine, and intended as her final book. The author’s preface was completed only three days before her death, at age ninety.

Helen Vendler was the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard. Her many books of poetry criticism include The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1997), Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries (2010), and The Ocean, The Bird and The Scholar (2015). Her book Part of Nature: Modern American Poets (1980) won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Criticism. In 2023, she was awarded a Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Vendler died of cancer at age 90, on the anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, April 23, 2024.