The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar:Essays on Poets and Poetry

Helen Vendler

For those who cherish great literature and the writers who create it, Helen Vendler’s new collection of essays, book reviews and auto-biographical prose is a treasure. The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar contains over two decades of thoughtful and exquisite interpretations of American writers like Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop as well as Irish writers like William B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney. She reveals to readers the profound value that literature offers to the human experience, and leaves us uplifted by poetry’s possibilities. The introductory essay that opens the book is inspiring. Raised in 1950s Boston in “an exaggeratedly observant Catholic household,” Helen Hennessy found her love of books from her parents, both teachers. But as a female, she was discouraged from pursuing literature, and instead studied chemistry. Eventually she made her way back, finding encouragement from teachers like John Kelleher, head of Harvard’s Celtic Studies Department, who she writes, “never forgot the link between literature and life.”

Harvard University Press | $35 cloth / 464 pages / May 2015