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| From the issue dated January 28, 2005 |
The Grand Dame of Poetry Criticism
No one has had the public impact of the rigorously untheoretical Helen Vendler|
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In literary conversation, she is sometimes called "Dame Helen" -- a nickname that can be affectionate or sarcastic, occasionally a little of both. No American critic writing about contemporary poetry has quite the prominence of Helen Vendler, the A. Kingsley Porter university professor at Harvard University. Over the past four decades, her reviews and essays have introduced readers to such poets as Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, and Seamus Heaney.
"As a literary gatekeeper, especially when she was reviewing for The New Yorker," says Hank Lazer, a poet, critic, and administrator at the University of Alabama, "Helen Vendler could really put someone in the literary spotlight -- have them immediately be in the serious running for the Pulitzer and the National Book Award nominations, for major-press publication, even for major academic positions. It is an ability she would publicly deny having, but virtually no one else has wielded that sort of power."
Hence the respect for Dame Helen. Hence, too, the grumbling. Whole sectors of the poetry world have complained about the limits of her sensibility. She doesn't like experimentation, one complaint goes. Her attitude toward poetry is too academic, says another. At the same time, somewhat paradoxically, literary scholars often consider Ms. Vendler far out of touch with their profession.
Her approach is, so to speak, rigorously untheoretical: A poem speaks to her, or it doesn't, and the critical essay is Ms. Vendler's preferred medium of reply. "When I was writing my dissertation on some really abstruse works by Yeats," she once noted, "my notion, which is still my notion, was that if what I write pleases the poet, then what I have done is all right."
Few literary scholars now consider the author's intention as the final criterion in discussing the meaning of a work. So Ms. Vendler's desire to win the approval of poets seems even more striking -- a mark of temperament rather than of professional standards. Perhaps the death of the poet only makes the challenge more interesting.
In recent years, Ms. Vendler has been carrying on more and more of her conversation with poetry from the podium, as a distinguished lecturer. In May she gave the annual Jefferson Lecture at the National Endowment for the Humanities, a laurel that includes a $10,000 honorarium. Ms. Vendler's most recent book, Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, published last fall by Harvard University Press, is based on her Clark Lectures at Cambridge University, in England. And she is now writing the preface to Invisible Listeners, a revision of her talks on lyric poetry that were delivered at Princeton University, forthcoming this year from Princeton University Press.
At first Ms. Vendler appears simply to have assumed a new role in her capacity as elder stateswoman of poetry criticism. But her lectures themselves amount to a solemn warning about the state of cultural literacy and the function of literary studies. The reading of poetry, she contends, requires a set of skills and dispositions being lost in the scholarly rush to interdisciplinarity. That worry sounds old-fashioned, yet it is as current as the most recent discussions by the leadership of the Modern Language Association about whether or not literary scholars can explain what they do to the larger public (The Chronicle, January 7).
Memo to Posterity
Ms. Vendler does not do e-mail. Somehow this is not surprising. Prolonged reading of her work conveys the sense of a mind utterly devoted to poetry, a woman not at all shy about her bookishness. "I am not interested in groups," Ms. Vendler said during a panel discussion in New York five years ago. "I have never joined a political party. I have never voted. I have never registered to vote. I have never gone to a church. I have never belonged to a club. I've never belonged to anything." For the journalist seeking to interview her, it is something of a relief to learn that she has a telephone.
All the more striking, then, that one of her formative intellectual experiences came via an innovation in classroom technology, the overhead projector. She recalls sitting in a darkened classroom in the 1950s as I.A. Richards -- one of the founding fathers of the New Criticism -- guided students through poems line by line, sometimes word by word. He demonstrated how the parts of, say, Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" were connected, modifying and enriching one another.
This was "close reading," the approach Ms. Vendler would take to analyzing the poetry of George Herbert, William Butler Yeats, and Wallace Stevens in her early scholarly books. Her scope was impressive: Not every scholar would feel up to writing about (respectively) an Elizabethan religious poet, an Irish revolutionary whose verse reflects a complex system of occult doctrine, and an American modernist who wrote lyrics of the mind's inward turn and imaginative thrust.
Perhaps this single-minded devotion to reading makes Ms. Vendler appear a bit severe, as the clichés about the bookish temperament would have it. In conversation, though, her tone is warm, and she even sounds pleasantly surprised at the course her career has taken. "I hadn't expected to write for the general public," she says. But in the mid-1960s, while she was an instructor at Smith College, The Massachusetts Review asked her to write a survey of the year's poetry. "I found I liked doing it -- thinking about the books of the year, which ones were worth notice, and why," she says. "Then The New York Times asked me to review for them, and I did that for a number of years, and also for The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books."
The novelist and essayist John Leonard recalls "putting Helen on retainer as our ex officio poetry critic" when he was editor of The New York Times Book Review in the early 1970s. "I thought she was so good -- prickly and with strong opinions, of course, but unlike the poets who had reviewed for us, she was honest. I learned the hard way that you couldn't trust a poet to tell you if he was the best friend or the worst enemy of whoever he was reviewing. We just sent her everything, giving her the option to refuse or to suggest another reviewer."
Ms. Vendler describes her editors as very generous. "They gave me space, and interesting books," she says. "It was like a self-seminar, in addition to whatever of my own I had in hand to write." But they gave her more than that. By the 1980s, Ms. Vendler had no rival as the most influential critic of contemporary poetry in the United States.
The expression "literary tastemaker" is one she rejects, however. "You can think of yourself as a broadcaster to the public, without thinking of yourself as a tastemaker," she says. "Fundamentally the judgment of contemporaries doesn't matter. There are people who are honored in their lifetimes and disappear without a trace. The only important judgment of poets is made by posterity."
Boxing Helen
Such modest disclaimers never satisfied some of her detractors. In a scathing essay reprinted in his collection Prophets & Professors: Essays on the Lives and Works of Modern Poets (Story Line Press, 1995), the freelance critic Bruce Bawer denounced Ms. Vendler as "an academic through and through," given to writing "as if poetry without criticism is as valueless as an LP without a record player."
Less vitriolic in tone, but comparable in substance, are the comments of Charles North, a professor of English and poet in residence at Pace University, in New York. "Clearly she means well, is very smart and perceptive, and has all the scholarly virtues," he writes by e-mail. "But (you can hear my axe being ground) she, like many other critics, appears unwilling to step out of the habits of mind that work so well in scholarly endeavors."
Mr. North says, "I would like to feel, but never quite manage to do so, that she genuinely appreciates and understands" what contemporary poets such as James Schuyler and John Ashbery do on the page. But he senses that the scholarly impulse to analyze and historicize often comes first for Ms. Vendler, while aesthetic response lags behind.
Other poets and critics complain that Ms. Vendler's sensibility keeps her isolated from large areas of literature."She is so anti-experimental," says Mr. Lazer, "that she can't, or won't, consider the bulk of the best poetry from 1850 to the present. That sounds hyperbolic, but I mean it."
For experimentalists, the problem is that Ms. Vendler's taste and approach are, in effect, Romantic. She has a bias in favor of the poetry that is, as William Wordsworth put it, "emotion recollected in tranquility." In work she likes, the verses offer a carefully wrought representation of someone (either the poet or a literary persona) reflecting upon a situation, experience, or problem. Much contemporary poetry rejects that model of the "well-made verse," however. Writers experiment with the shape of the poem on the page, or avoid the personal voice entirely, exploring the way language escapes the control of the individual consciousness.
"I don't think she is able to read with enthusiasm or understanding poetry that doesn't resolve itself on the level of the sentence," says Mr. Lazer, himself a member of the school known as Language poetry. "That makes even reading Emily Dickinson a problem, but it absolutely leaves out Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles Olson, Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, on and on and on. The inability to value the collage element in poetry -- the more adventurous and fragmentary kinds of writing -- has a really disastrous effect. It's not a minor oversight."
Complaints about the limits of Ms. Vendler's responsiveness are much overstated, says Steve Burt, her former student and an assistant professor of English at Macalester College. Citing her collection of reviews and essays Soul Says (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1995), he notes that it "contains admiring essays about Allen Ginsberg, James Schuyler, Gary Snyder, James Merrill, Rita Dove, August Kleinzahler, and Adrienne Rich -- poets who collectively have almost nothing in common but their American passports. I don't think it's a failing that she hasn't addressed every subgenre and subtradition under the sun." He calls her "a keen and subtle reader of many kinds of poetry," adding that "nobody could be, or become, a keen and subtle reader of every single kind."
Then Things Got Really Bad
With hindsight, even some of her detractors might consider the peak of Ms. Vendler's influence as a kind of golden age. In the early 1990s, The New Yorker abandoned any serious commitment to poetry criticism, right around the time it discovered the mingled delights of celebrity journalism and four-letter words. Meanwhile, the space that newspapers and magazines devote to literary coverage has shrunk, sometimes to the vanishing point. Small-circulation journals do still publish criticism of contemporary verse. But the reviews often appear to be written in code -- poets making polite, vague noises about one another's work, in an exquisitely cryptic form of logrolling.
For her part, Ms. Vendler, now 71 years old, has stepped back from the role that made her so influential. She is candid about hitting the limits of her interest in new work. After reviewing several generations of rising poets, she says, "you get to a group whose references are not yours any longer. They're talking about the cartoons they watched on television when they were children, the movies they saw, the music they grew up with, the kinds of activities they engaged in. And I fear I have lost touch."
She says she "wanders the earth" asking people if they know of any major 30-year-old poets she should read. "And they all say, 'Not really.' I don't know if we're in a lull. There are competent poets, but nobody taking the world by storm the way Ginsberg did, or Lowell did. I worry about it."
Instead of worrying in review essays, though, she has in recent years taken to the lectern. "People have been asking me to do lecture series," she says, "and often they are old friends, so I don't say no." She describes the lectures as a gratifying distraction from the demands of a book she is writing about why Yeats cast his poems in particular verse forms.
Still, her talks have been more than an opportunity to revisit the verse of Wallace Stevens or Walt Whitman while also being honored for her contribution to literary criticism. In her Jefferson Lecture and in Poets Thinking, her most recent book, Ms. Vendler is making a claim that the careful reading of poetry is itself an intellectual discipline -- one that is distinct from whatever one might say about it using the tools of cultural theory.
In the book, she describes listening to a series of papers by a philosopher, a political scientist, and an anthropologist discussing Alexander Pope's Essay on Man (of "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan/The proper study of Mankind is Man" fame). The scholars examined the 18th-century poet's ideas from the standards of their respective disciplines and found them wanting. None, she says, dealt with Pope's artistry -- his techniques for "playing with ideas: miniaturizing them, modeling them, mocking them" through intricate satirical constructions.
The problem, Ms. Vendler says, was not with her colleagues from other fields, but with the marginal place that the arts have played in American education.
"It started with the distrust by the Puritans of all the arts as the practices of libertines," she says. "And we had to forge a new nation, build it moving westward, which always meant that a practical education was more highly valued than an aesthetic education. I remember, when I taught at Swarthmore, being told that it took a full vote of the Board of Trustees in 1879 to allow a piano on campus. That's more or less typical."
In consequence, she says, the humanities, at least in the United States, have treated literary study as a poor relation of the core disciplines of philosophy and history.
"Philosophy would train you in right thinking," she says, "and history was to make you a good citizen of our democracy, which was thought to be the pinnacle of civilization. The arts didn't figure in the instruction of the young." A student taking the core curriculum in liberal arts would read the epics of Homer and Virgil -- but as stories about the founding values of civilization, not as verse.
"The way poetry is practiced was considered of no serious import to higher education," she says. "That struck me as very wrong. After all, some of Shakespeare's sonnets are among the glories of our literature, and should belong in the training of the mind." Ms. Vendler has been using her appearances at the lectern to advocate the idea that the skills involved in reading poetry closely have as central a place in the humanities as philosophical analysis or historical context does.
Last summer, after her Jefferson Lecture became available online, an essay in response appeared on The Reading Experience, a literary blog run by Daniel Green, an adjunct instructor of English at the University of Maine at Presque Isle. "It is precisely Vendler's sincerity and her eloquent communication of her own passion for poetry," he wrote, "that ultimately, for me at least, make reading this lecture a rather sad experience. ... Given how thoroughly the study of literature (art more broadly) has been rejected in this country, by administrators, politicians, students, parents, employers, and most pathetically, by literature professors themselves, the context in which her words are offered makes this lecture sound more like a funeral oration than an inspirational address, an elegy for what might have been rather than a proposal for curricular reform."
Around the time Ms. Vendler was preparing her lecture for the NEH, Marjorie Perloff was revising an essay making similar arguments, now the first chapter of her book Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (University of Alabama Press, 2004). What makes this more than an interesting coincidence is that Ms. Perloff, a 73-year-old scholar in residence at the University of Southern California, is often treated as the literary avant garde's answer to Ms. Vendler -- the critic who has done the most to win an audience for experimental poetry. In 2006 Ms. Perloff will serve as president of the Modern Language Association.
Like Ms. Vendler, Ms. Perloff objects to the tendency to treat poetic form as an expendable distraction from analyzing ideas or historical context. "I'm always shocked," she says, "when I see that people who are supposed to be in literature can't analyze a simple poem." She describes talking to a young scholar who had written on Keats and asking about the poet's use of terza rima. He could not answer because he didn't really know anything about verse form.
"There are specific things to be learned about literature," says Ms. Perloff. "Just like economics or history or any other field, you have to learn the vocabulary. What you get today, and I think Helen would agree, is that you get people using literature as an excuse to talk about the war in Iraq. Literature becomes a symptom of a particular social formation. As soon as literature becomes instrumental in that way, it becomes uninteresting, since you can always use other things instead. That's why there is a kind of malaise" among literary scholars.
Asked about the seeming convergence of her attitude with Ms. Vendler's, she acknowledges it while stressing their deep differences in taste. "She has much more of a moral view of literature than I do," says Ms. Perloff. "The literature she likes, say, Robert Lowell, she likes because it dramatizes suffering and teaches you certain moral lessons. I don't think art makes one a better person, that literature teaches you the meaning of life. But the sheer pleasure of the text -- the sheer joy in all the different values of literature, fictive or poetic -- these are the greatest things. The more you can learn about it, the better." Ms. Perloff says that will be her theme as president of the MLA.
Meanwhile, Ms. Vendler -- allergic, as ever, to membership in large organizations, let alone running for office -- says she will continue her own work of reading poems and trying to create contagious enthusiasm. She quotes a favorite verse from Dylan Thomas:
All I have to give I offer"It means that you offer your little capacities," she explains. "And every generation is astonished that the capacities on offer are not better. 'Are we all there is?' you say to yourself. And you wish you were better. You wish your tastes were more catholic, perhaps. But all you can do is offer what you have. I've always loved thinking about poetry, and writing about it. That's my vocation. All I can do is practice it."
wine, bread, and halter.
A LIFE IN LETTERS
A selection of Helen Vendler's most important published works:
- Yeats's Vision and the Later Plays, Harvard U. Press, 1963
- On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems, Harvard U. Press, 1969
- The Poetry of George Herbert, Harvard U. Press, 1975
- Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets, Harvard U. Press, 1980
- The Odes of John Keats, Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 1983
- Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire, U. of Tennessee Press, 1984
- The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics, Harvard U. Press, 1988
- The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition, Harvard U. Press, 1995
- The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 1997
- Seamus Heaney, Harvard U. Press, 1998
- Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Harvard U. Press, 2004
http://chronicle.com
Section: Research & Publishing
Volume 51, Issue 21, Page A14