Helen Vendler, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), ix-xix + 428 pp.

Abstract

This book is so good — and so commanding — that perhaps the best way to review it is to dispute some points of principle and particle that have struck me while reading it: that way, readers will have a sense of some of the issues entailed. Besides, no book by Helen Vendler is a bowl of strawberries and cream. I begin with the title, which strikes me as inapposite: We dreamed that a great painter had been bornTo cold Clare rock and Galway rock and thorn,To that stern colour and that delicate l..