Vox 11: Helen Vendler on Personal Style

"As is often said, but as often forgotten, poems are not their paraphrases, because the paraphrase does not represent the thinking process as it strives toward ultimate precision, but rather reduces the poem to summarized "thoughts" or "statements" or "meanings."

"Because the highest poetic achievement is the gaining of an unmistakable, idiosyncratic, and formally coherent personal style - extending to all planes of the poem from the imaginative to the musical - it follows that on the plane of thought poets will not resemble each other, that they will devise characteristic and recognizable patterns of thinking, which may themselves change over time, of course, but will also exhibit within each poet a psychological continuity."

"Because each poet is so distinctive in patterns of mental expression, my topic - poets thinking -cannot be generalized, but must be approached poet by poet." (Vendler, Helen. Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Print.)

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