Inhabit the Poem

A posthumous collection of essays by Helen Vendler, including one about Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson:

Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays

Helen Vendler

Library of America

ISBN:  978-1598538274

September 2025

Helen Vendler was our greatest reader of poetry, a scholar who illuminated its inner mechanisms and emotional roots for a wide audience. Always attentive to the stylistic and imaginative features of a poem, Vendler addresses the work of a wide range of American, English, and Irish poets both the canonical and the unexpected in 13 essays: Walt Whitman, author of the first PTSD poem. Sylvia Plath, and the lost poetry of motherhood. William Cowper, James Merrill, and A. R. Ammons on poetic charm. Emily Bronte and Emily Dickinson, linked by a poetic mystery. Ocean Vuong and the shaping imagination of poetry today, or a literary Wallace Stevens and the enigma of beauty. In these and other essays Vendler demonstrates once again why the Irish poet Seamus Heaney called her 'the best close reader of poems to be found on the literary pages.' The thirteen poignant essays gathered here were all published in the last three years of Vendler's life, in Liberties magazine, and intended as her final book. The author's preface was completed only three days before her death, at age ninety.

PoemShape:

Keats would go on and on about poets’ laurels and would write the Odes and Hyperion—and there is not a shred of snark in those. Emily Brontë, who Dickinson read and favored, never once let her poet’s mask fall, but adopts the elevated, lofty and literary distancing of her peers. 

Library of America: 

Whether reflecting on a Black poet’s interest in creating the mind and language of an extraterrestrial (Robert Hayden), on the poetics of motherhood (Sylvia Plath), on the first PTSD poem (Walt Whitman), or on a literary conundrum (why, of the many poems known to her, Emily Dickinson requested on her deathbed that Emily Brontë’s “No coward soul is mine” be read at her funeral), Vendler demonstrates why the Nobel Prize–winning poet Seamus Heaney called her “the best close reader of poems to be found on the literary pages.”