When a poet addresses a living person--whether friend or enemy, lover or sister--we recognize the expression of intimacy. But what impels poets to leap across time and space to speak to invisible listeners, seeking an ideal intimacy--George Herbert with God, Walt Whitman with a reader in the future, John Ashbery with the Renaissance painter Francesco Parmigianino? In Invisible Listeners , Helen Vendler argues that such poets must invent the language that will enact, on the page, an intimacy they lack in life. Through ...
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When a poet addresses a living person--whether friend or enemy, lover or sister--we recognize the expression of intimacy. But what impels poets to leap across time and space to speak to invisible listeners, seeking an ideal intimacy--George Herbert with God, Walt Whitman with a reader in the future, John Ashbery with the Renaissance painter Francesco Parmigianino? In Invisible Listeners , Helen Vendler argues that such poets must invent the language that will enact, on the page, an intimacy they lack in life. Through brilliantly insightful and gracefully written readings of these three great poets over three different centuries, Vendler maps out their relationships with their chosen listeners. For his part, Herbert revises the usual "vertical" address to God in favor of a "horizontal" one-addressing God as a friend. Whitman hovers in a sometimes erotic, sometimes quasi-religious language in conceiving the democratic camerado, who will, following Whitman's example, find his true self. And yet the camerado will be replaced, in Whitman's verse, by the ultimate invisible listener, Death. Ashbery, seeking a fellow artist who believes that art always distorts what it represents, finds he must travel to the remote past. In tones both tender and skeptical he addresses Parmigianino, whose extraordinary self-portrait in a convex mirror furnishes the poet with both a theory and a precedent for his own inventions. By creating the forms and speech of ideal intimacy, these poets set forth the possibility of a more complete and satisfactory human interchange--an ethics of relation that is uncoerced, understanding, and free.
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Add this copy of Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman to cart. $8.39, good condition, Sold by More Than Words rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Waltham, MA, UNITED STATES, published 2007 by Princeton University Press.
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New. What impels poets to leap across time and space to speak to invisible listeners, seeking an ideal intimacy? This book argues that such poets must invent the language that will enact, on the page, an intimacy they lack in life. Num Pages: 112 pages. BIC Classification: 1KBB; 2AB; DSC. Category: (G) General (US: Trade); (P) Professional & Vocational; (U) Tertiary Education (US: College). Dimension: 210 x 134 x 10. Weight in Grams: 150. 2007. First Edition. Paperback.....We ship daily from our Bookshop.
Add this copy of Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman to cart. $35.00, like new condition, Sold by Dan Pope Books rated 3.0 out of 5 stars, ships from WEST Hartford, CT, UNITED STATES, published 2005 by Princeton University Press.
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As New. First printing. Complete number line, including the 1. A fine book in a fine dust jacket. A tight copy, as new, appears unread, without any marks or defects. Dust jacket is clean and bright. Comes with archival-quality dust jacket protector. Shipped in well padded box. Smoke-free. Although not marked as such in any way, this book came from the library of poet and literary critic J.D. McClatchy, from his estate in Stonington, Connecticut.
Add this copy of Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman to cart. $35.61, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 2007 by Princeton University Press.
Add this copy of Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman to cart. $38.07, new condition, Sold by Booksplease rated 3.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Southport, MERSEYSIDE, UNITED KINGDOM, published 2007 by Princeton University Press.
