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.

海倫·文德勒 哈佛大學英文係阿·金斯利·波特校級教授。著有《葉芝的幻象及其後期戲劇》《展開翅翼：華萊士·斯蒂文斯的長詩》《喬治·赫伯特的詩歌》《風格的突破：霍普金斯，希尼，格拉漢姆》《謝默斯·希尼》《詩人的成年：彌爾頓，濟慈，艾略特，普拉斯》《詩人思考：蒲柏，惠特曼，狄金森，葉芝》《最後之視，最後之書》等。

周星月 加州大學聖巴巴拉分校比較文學博士，研究英語和葡萄牙語現代詩歌與詩學。現為南方科技大學人文社科青年會士。

王 敖 詩人，學者，音樂人。耶魯大學博士，任教於威斯利安大學東亞學院。