“In reminding us to look at and listen to the actual words on the page...Vendler invites us to expand our response to experience, and to find in it—if we are both attentive and lucky—beauty and solace.” —Christopher Benfey, New York Review of Books The grand dame of poetic criticism defends lyric poetry as a product of fierce intelligence as much as creative inspiration. 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 very different poets she considers here, Helen Vendler reveals a style of thinking in operation. All poets of any value are thinkers, she argues, even if no two think alike. The four poets taken up in this volume—Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and William Butler Yeats—come from three different centuries and three different nations, and their styles of thinking are characteristically idiosyncratic. Vendler gives us Pope performing as a satiric