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HELEN VENDLER. Poets Thinking: Pope Whitman Dickinson Yeats. Cambridge: Harvard, 2004. Pp. viii + 142. $19.95.
Ms. Vendler's Poets Thinking was inspired, she tells us in the essay on Pope that forms one of the four parts of this book, by the need to defend that eighteenth-century writer from a 1983 English Institute panel of modern "thinkers" - a philosopher, a political scientist, and an anthropologist - who undertook to evaluate Pope's Essay on Man from their perspectives. "The panelists ended, with a certain complacency, by concluding that we were wiser than Pope, and that [such] poems . . . must be relegated, as outdated artifacts, to the museum of cultural attitudes." Ms. Vendler argues, on the contraiy, that when persons from other disciplines, or even our own, approach poems, too often they do not know how to examine how poets think. What they examine is rather a translation of the poem into its "conceptual paraphrase." Examining the same poem as the English Institute panel, Ms. Vendler shows not only how looking at a poet thinking differs from looking at a paraphrase of what he thought, but also reveals the "peculiar stresses" to which "ideas" are subject "when they...