Introduction: last looks, last books -- Looking at the worst: Wallace Stevens' The rock -- The contest of melodrama and restraint: Sylvia Plath's Ariel -- Images of subtraction: Robert Lowell's Day by day -- Caught and freed: Elizabeth Bishop and Geography III -- Self-portraits while dying: James Merrill and A scattering of salts.
Summary
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. 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....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"--From publisher description.
