The Three Acts of Criticism
Helen Vendler, 26 May 1994
The Oxford Companion to 20th-Century Poetry in English
edited by Ian Hamilton.
Oxford, 602 pp., £25, February 1994,0 19 866147 9 Show More
edited by Ian Hamilton.
Oxford, 602 pp., £25, February 1994,
“... about a poet, but not so much as does the characteristic internal structure of his or her lyrics. Emily Dickinson’s binary and ternary forms are symbols of her bitter contrastive briskness and ironic point-making; Whitman’s expansive middles, with their ranging glances, show a poet who sits down in the centre of his subject-matter and gathers it ... ”