When a poet addresses a living person - whether friend or enemy, lover or sister - we recognize the expression of intimacy. But what impels poets to leap across time and space to speak to invisible listeners, seeking an ideal intimacy - George Herbert with God, Walt Whitman with a reader in the future, John Ashbery with the Renaissance painter Francesco Parmigianino? In "Invisible Listeners", Helen Vendler argues that such poets must invent the language that will enact, on the page, an intimacy they lack in life. Through brilliantly insightful and gracefully written readings of these three great poets over three different centuries, Vendler maps out their relationships with their chosen listeners. For his part, Herbert revises the usual 'vertical' address to God in favor of a 'horizontal' one-addressing God as a friend. Whitman hovers in a sometimes erotic, sometimes quasi-religious language in conceiving the democratic camerado, who will, following Whitman's example, find his true self. And yet the camerado will be replaced, in Whitman's verse, by the ultimate invisible listener, Death. Ashbery, seeking a fellow artist who believes that art always distorts what it represents, finds he must travel to the remote past. In tones both tender and skeptical he addresses Parmigianino, whose extraordinary self-portrait in a convex mirror furnishes the poet with both a theory and a precedent for his own inventions. By creating the forms and speech of ideal intimacy, these poets set forth the possibility of a more complete and satisfactory human interchange - an ethics of relation that is uncoerced, understanding, and free.

海伦·文德勒 哈佛大学英文系阿·金斯利·波特校级教授。著有《叶芝的幻象及其后期戏剧》《展开翅翼：华莱士·斯蒂文斯的长诗》《乔治·赫伯特的诗歌》《风格的突破：霍普金斯，希尼，格拉汉姆》《谢默斯·希尼》《诗人的成年：弥尔顿，济慈，艾略特，普拉斯》《诗人思考：蒲柏，惠特曼，狄金森，叶芝》《最后之视，最后之书》等。

周星月 加州大学圣巴巴拉分校比较文学博士，研究英语和葡萄牙语现代诗歌与诗学。现为南方科技大学人文社科青年会士。

王 敖 诗人，学者，音乐人。耶鲁大学博士，任教于威斯利安大学东亚学院。