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In Last Looks, Last Books, the eminent critic Helen Vendler examines the ways in which five great modern American poets, writing their final books, try to find a style that does justice to life and death alike. With traditional religious consolations no longer available to them, these poets must invent new ways to express the crisis of death, as well as the paradoxical coexistence of a declining body and an undiminished consciousness. In The Rock, Wallace Stevens writes simultaneous narratives of winter and spring; in Ariel, Sylvia Plath sustains melodrama in cool formality; and in Day by Day, Robert Lowell subtracts from plenitude. In Geography III, Elizabeth Bishop is both caught and freed, while James Merrill, in A Scattering of Salts, creates a series of self-portraits as he dies, representing himself by such things as a Christmas tree, human tissue on a laboratory slide, and the evening/morning star. The solution for one poet will not serve for another; each must invent a bridge from an old style to a new one. Casting a last look at life as they contemplate death, these modern writers enrich the resources of lyric poetry.

Death in literature. --- American poetry --- History and criticism. --- Stevens, Wallace --- Criticism and interpretation --- Plath, Sylvia --- Lowell, Robert Traill Spence, Jr. --- Bishop, Elizabeth --- Merrill, James Ingram --- 20th century --- History and criticism --- Death in literature --- Adjective. --- After Apple-Picking. --- Allusion. --- Amputation. --- Ars Poetica (Horace). --- Asymmetry. --- Because I could not stop for Death. --- Bevel. --- Binocular vision. --- Bluebeard's Castle. --- Burial. --- Calcium carbonate. --- Carbon monoxide. --- Caspar David Friedrich. --- Coffin. --- Couplet. --- Death and Life. --- Death drive. --- Death. --- Deathbed. --- Desiccation. --- Diction. --- Disjecta membra. --- Dramatis Personae. --- Elizabeth Bishop. --- Emblem. --- Emily Dickinson. --- Emptiness. --- Executive director. --- Ezra Pound. --- Fairy tale. --- Fine art. --- Grandparent. --- Hexameter. --- Human extinction. --- Impermanence. --- In Death. --- In the Flesh (TV series). --- Incineration. --- Irony. --- James Merrill. --- John Donne. --- John Keats. --- Lady Lazarus. --- Lament. --- Last Poems. --- Lecture. --- Life Studies. --- Lycidas. --- Macabre. --- Melodrama. --- Metaphor. --- Microtome. --- Misery (novel). --- Mourning. --- Narcissism. --- Narrative. --- National Gallery of Art. --- National Humanities Center. --- Ottava rima. --- Otto Plath. --- Pentameter. --- Phone sex. --- Pity. --- Plath. --- Platitude. --- Poetry. --- Princeton University Press. --- Psychotherapy. --- Rhyme scheme. --- Rhyme. --- Rigor mortis. --- Robert Lowell. --- Sadness. --- Sestet. --- She Died. --- Skirt. --- Slowness (novel). --- Soliloquy. --- Sonnet. --- Stanza. --- Subtraction. --- Suffering. --- Suicide attempt. --- Sylvia Plath. --- Ted Hughes. --- Tercet. --- Terza rima. --- The Other Hand. --- The Snapper (novel). --- Trepanning. --- Tyvek. --- Villanelle. --- Vocation (poem). --- W. B. Yeats. --- W. H. Auden. --- Wallace Stevens. --- Wasting. --- William Shakespeare. --- Writing.