Poets thinking

"Poetry has often been considered an irrational genre, more expressive than logical, more meditative than given to coherent argument. And yet, in each of the four different poets she considers here, Helen Vendler reveals a style of thinking in operation; although they may prefer different means, she argues, all poets of any value are thinkers." "The four poets taken up in this volume - Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and William Butler Yeats - come from three centuries and three nations, and their styles of thinking are characteristically idiosyncratic. Vendler shows us Pope…