Baedeker to the Realms of Gold : VOICES & VISIONS The Poet in America;<i> edited by Helen Vendler (Random House: $29.95; 528 pp.) </i>

This immense volume of essays is designed as a companion to a PBS series of one-hour programs affectionately referred to in the country’s English departments as “Movies About Dead Poets.” In addition to constituting a useful history of American verse, from Emily Dickinson to Sylvia Plath, the book is a veritable anthology, all but one of its 13 poets (T. S. Eliot, whose estate is grudging about granting permissions) represented by extensive quotations. The nearly 200 photographs and illustrations, moreover, offer riches in abundance for those persuaded that pictures are indeed more telling than words.

The films themselves, combining biographical information with critical commentary by knowledgeable critics and cultural historians, are entertaining, instructive, and uneven. The most effective--on Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Plath--feature recordings of the poet’s voice imaginatively fused with appropriate visual imagery. As for the writers who lived in less technically sophisticated times, “Walt Whitman” has the benefit of Galway Kinnell’s riveting delivery of the verse but also, in a directorial miscalculation, introduces a bewhiskered actor impersonating the bard. “Emily Dickinson” does a nice job of re-creating the social and intellectual milieu from which the poet emerged, but Jane Alexander’s flat recitation of the poetry saps all vitality from the film and makes one yearn for Claire Bloom’s luminous “Belle of Amherst,” shown last year on British TV but not yet seen in the States.

We get a good sense of Langston Hughes’ public life in the film about him but (and this is also true of Arnold Rampersad’s otherwise illuminating essay in the book) no inkling of his private self, of any intimate relationships. Given, by the way, Hughes’ love of blues and spirituals, this is the only film in which the use of music as underscoring for the poetry is not ruinous. Since poetry is itself music, introducing a score is the equivalent of using Stravinsky, say, as background for aperformance of Copland. The obtrusive Muzak (there’s no other word), the use of which reveals an absence of respect for unembellished language, is especially manipulative and distracting in the portraits of Elizabeth Bishop, Hart Crane, and Marianne Moore. In the abysmal T. S. Eliot film, moreover, even the poet’s masterly reading of “The Waste Land” is polluted by a noisy accompaniment. This won’t do.

The Williams film, though occasionally arty in a way the poet never was, features not only the poet’s own inimitable voice but also a moving recitation by Allen Ginsberg. “Wallace Stevens,” too, has the benefit of readings by a living poet, James Merrill, most of which are mercifully spared musical underscoring. Other of the films are also enhanced by the inclusion of living poets, including Joseph Brodsky, Mark Strand, Adrienne Rich, Richard Howard, Richard Wilbur, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Robert Hass, and Octavio Paz--an impressive galaxy of singers indeed.

Like the films they supplement, the book’s 13 essays are uneven, some considerably more readable than others. I especially like Calvin Bedient’s “Whitman,” with its engaging critical voice: “Laid end to end, Whitman’s long lines would form their own virtual transcontinental railroad, and the locomotive and cars to boot, and varied sights along the way.” Allan Williamson’s intelligent but awkwardly written essay on Hart Crane, by contrast, needs editing. Helen McNeil, in an arid piece on Elizabeth Bishop, doesn’t mention her subject’s often destructive personal relationships, though they were hardly irrelevant to the poet’s seemingly impersonal art. (McNeil’s essay on Plath, unlike the superb film it complements, is also disappointing.)

Obviously, one way to deal with volatile material is to ignore it, and hence in an otherwise dazzling essay on Pound, Hugh Kenner, one of our greatest critics, approaches the poet’s anti-Semitism and the controversies that swirled around his life by saying nothing at all. “The emphasis belongs where I keep it,” he insists, “on the continuities of the life of the mind and on the pleasures of his craggy texts.” But can a craggy text ever be totally divorced from the craggy views that produced it? The Pound film, as it happens, by introducing Alfred Kazin as a kind of prosecuting attorney, offers a more balanced view of the poet.

Helen Vendler, who provides a lively preface in her role as the collection’s editor, also contributes an introduction to Stevens that is passionate, lucid, and filled with persuasive readings. I also admire Richard B. Sewall on Emily Dickinson, John Slatin on Marianne Moore, and Vereen Bell on Robert Lowell, though I wish that among his “Suggestions for Further Readings” he had included Mark Rudman’s invaluable “Robert Lowell: An Introduction to the Poetry.” Richard Poirier, Robert Frost’s best reader, offers a stirring brief essay marred only by a slightly defensive tone--as if it were still necessary to persuade us that Frost is to be taken as seriously as Eliot and Williams are. Marjorie Perloff’s “Williams,” though sporadically compelling, is problematic because this usually incisive critic provides no notes, presents strained readings of some early poems, and underrates the poet’s late work, including “Paterson.”

What we have here, then, is a plump volume filled with pictures and poems, with prose that is sometimes elegant and sometimes wooden, with dull observations and keen analyses. Like the American poets they illuminate, these essays, if sometimes disappointing, offer much to delight in. For those who enjoy booking passage to the realms of gold, “Voices and Visions” will be an erratic but frequently quite valuable traveling companion.