Helen Vendler (Princeton University Press)

Helen Vendler, the leading poetry critic of her generation, sought the electrifying moment when all the parts of a work of verse click into place, “relating all to each, as a sudden shaft of light illuminates the poem as a whole.” A professor of English at Harvard, frequent contributor to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and author of many books on writers ranging from Emily Dickinson to Adrienne Rich, Vendler was drawn from a young age to the unique conjunction of language, feeling, and concrete subject matter that crystallizes so profoundly in the art she studied and championed.

In the recently published Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays, Library of America gathers thirteen of Vendler’s revelatory pieces of criticism, each typically focused on a single poem or poet and all originally published in Liberties: A Journal of Culture and Politics in Vendler’s final years. In these engrossing, intellectually daring pieces probing the lives and creations of Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Ocean Vuong, and others, Vendler—who died in 2024—demonstrates her peerless capacity to, as Seamus Heaney said, “second-guess the sixth sense of the poem.”

Below, Stephanie Burt, acclaimed poet, scholar, and former student of Vendler’s, reflects on this towering critic’s contributions to how we read and understand the mechanics, meanings, and inherent mysteries of poetry, both privately on the page and together in the classroom.

Library of America: Helen Vendler was an advocate of what she called “reading from the point of view of a writer.” Did her approach influence how poetry was studied in the academy?

Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays

Stephanie Burt: It certainly did. You can see her influence almost anywhere in the academy (and in many places outside of it) where poems and poetry get taken seriously. In circles where only a certain strand of modernism and its descendants hold value, that influence holds as something to react against. In other circles (the ones I prefer) her work has shown, at this point, four generations of readers and critics how to climb inside a poem, how to take individual poems at once as constructions, things made of words, where every word counts and every overtone matters, and as ways to share and to represent feelings: things made by people, whose inward lives the poem can describe and convey.

To hear a poem well and to see how it’s put together, if the poem works, we have to imagine a person behind, or inside, or alongside, the poem, assembling language so that it fits how they have lived and how they feel. Maybe we can feel—or imagine what it’s like to feel—that way, too.

LOA: Early in her career, as one of the only female graduate students in literature at Harvard, Vendler recalls being told by the department chair that “we don’t want any women here.” Did her experiences of sexism in academia shape her views of poetry?

SB: The word “shape” seems too strong here, and I suspect she’d resist it. A woman of her generation and background, coming of age amid so many hair-raisingly patriarchal institutions, could not help but notice the patriarchy! She reacted to it, and to other forms of injustice, in her writings, too.

Each generation of poets and readers can and must figure out for itself what’s beautiful, and what’s valuable, for them, what we want to pass on, what we choose to re-read.

If you’re looking for ways in which her background, and her experience of intolerance, shaped her writings, though, you’ll learn a lot more by looking at the damage done to her (and to so many other people) by the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church in America. She grew up having adults tell her what she had to do, what doctrines she had to accept, what books she could read, and what paths they would let her pursue—not just because she was a girl and then a woman (though that, too) but because their religious orthodoxy said so.

As a result—and once you notice this strand in her work, you might see it all over—she reacted even more strongly than (say) I would against anyone who thought they had the whole truth, or thought they knew better than anyone else, or divided the world into good and evil, or told other people just what to believe. She wrote her great early book on George Herbert (and said so, later) in order to show what beauties and insights and wisdom Herbert’s poetry could hold for people who never wanted to go near a church. And she wrote, decades later, a counterintuitive and lovely essay about Pope’s “Essay on Man” in order to show how—being a poem, not a slab of versified doctrine—the poem’s own verse technique, and Pope’s own genius, complicated what initially look like assertions of general truths.

I’d say that Vendler led a feminist life, but she could never follow the banner of feminist literary criticism, labeled as such, in her lifetime: she wanted poems true to the complications (and the tragedies) that pervade our real lives, rather than allegories of right and wrong. If you want to see her clear embrace of practical feminist social goals alongside her appalled take on what she labeled “morally didactic critics,” you can look up her 1990 essay “Feminism and Literature” in the New York Review of Books, along with the exchange of letters that followed. You can also look at her series of essays on Adrienne Rich, whose early work she absolutely embraced: “someone my age was writing down my life.” She admired Rich’s later depictions of troubled minds, difficult choices, and self-divisions, but not Rich’s more public-facing, self-assured work: as always, she tried to put the poem, as a work of art, first.

Vendler portraits from the New York Review of Books and the American Academy in Berlin

LOA: “When the temporary topical relevance of any century’s poetry fades, its imaginative and stylistic powers survive,” Vendler wrote. How did she conceive of the social and historical dimension of poetry alongside its more immanent aesthetic qualities?

SB: (Takes deep breath.) A poem can address, or take in, as its apparent subject (sometimes it makes more sense to say “its occasion”) anything at all: the Easter Rising, a pond full of leaves, a bare field, a contemptible politician, an admirable politician, a vase full of tulips, a night’s box office receipts at a struggling theater, a broken window, a baby (readers familiar with Vendler’s work may know what poems I have in mind). An alert reader then asks, and a sympathetic critic gets the chance to show, what the poet and poem have done with that subject to create an engaging work of art, one worth hearing and reading over and over for its beauty and its wisdom and its strangeness and its rightness, after we’ve formed an opinion and learned the facts.

I may have more patience than Vendler did for poems that ask us to vote for a certain candidate, or to get out in the streets and protest, but I think she was right about what poems offer, and why some poems, centuries after their occasions, still get read for pleasure. And not only by historians.

LOA: Among the now-famous poets Vendler helped achieve critical recognition are Seamus Heaney, Jorie Graham, Rita Dove, and Mark Ford. What did Vendler look for in the poetry she championed, and how did she place her contemporaries in the pantheon of older works—by Hopkins, Blake, Dickinson—that she revered?

SB: Intelligence. Variety. An ear. Introspection. Some sense of some tradition (she had issues with poets, other than Whitman, who imagined that they could start a literary tradition from scratch). The perhaps paradoxical combination of durability and surprise.

One of the ways Vendler stood out—especially in her generation—as a critic (and this may be the sign of any real critic): she never became the partisan of a school. (She loved James Merrill, for example, but that didn’t mean she’d love any poets who sounded like Merrill, or set the same goals for themselves: she even said so when she wrote about Merrill.)

Poets championed by Vendler: Rita Dove (Poetry Foundation), Jorie Graham (Blue Flower Arts), and Mark Ford (CC BY 4.0)

She also, I think, had a tragic sense of life, and of course some antipathy to organized religion—but (again, that’s how it works when you’re a real critic!) she had plenty of time nonetheless for poets who inclined toward comic modes (Pope, Merrill, Langston Hughes), and for religious believers (Hopkins, Herbert, and even Donald Davie).

LOA: “Poetry is analytic as well as expressive,” Vendler writes. “It distinguishes, reconstructs, and redescribes what it discovers about the inner life.” How do these poles—emotional immediacy and empirical exactitude—converge in her essays, and how might they allow us to “inhabit the poem,” as this book’s title urges?

SB: I love that question, but the question does not permit a general answer. Each poem she admires connects those poles in its own way, like the two points of Donne’s famous angular compass. Each of her essays shows how that poem’s compass works.

LOA: In her classroom, Vendler insisted on the importance of memorizing and reciting poetry, positing that art shared in this manner can “keep [students] company through life.” What was Vendler like as a teacher?

SB: That’s like asking a duckling to describe its feathers, and its hatching, and its eggshell, and its nest. A full answer would be my professional autobiography. Of course she hatched other ducklings, too: I’m just one of them.

In a lecture hall she remained clear, inviting, unpretentious, and mindful, always, of all her students did not know. In a seminar room she was kind, generous, patient, and consistently insightful: one wanted to hear more of what she could say even when (as any good seminar teacher must) she stopped to listen to her students.

I do not think she would ever have drawn a bright line between criticism, or appreciation, or understanding (on the one hand) and the role of poetry outside the academy (on the other). A good critic shows what a poem can do for a thoughtful reader or listener, and such readers exist both in schools and far away from any school. She did see a line (who wouldn’t?) between scholars and non-scholars: anyone might appreciate Stevens’s poems about urban parks, but only some of us have the attention span, and the free time, and the inclination, to learn more about the actual parks that let him write his late poems.

Selection of books by Vendler: The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1999), The Odes of John Keats (1985), The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar (2018), and Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries (2012)

LOA: “We have a wonderful patrimony of the arts in America,” Vendler wrote, “and not enough is being done to disseminate it so that our population will love what has been supplied to them by their artists and writers.” What did Vendler see as the major contributions of American poetry to world literature? Did she exhibit a kind of patriotism in her assessment of the country’s poetic achievement?

SB: On patriotism, the best answer here comes from her uncollected essay, in A New Literary History of America, about Wallace Stevens as an American poet and containing an especially incisive passage about his poem “The Sick Man,” which she saw as Stevens’s take on America: admirable, with a history of its own, laid low by self-division and systemic, endemic anti-Black racism (I am aware that other parts of Stevens suggest far less acceptable racial politics).

She saw that the modern United States of America (not to be confused with the American continent) has developed some wonderful poems, poets, and poetry: what she called, quoting Yeats, “gradual time’s last gift,” since the linguistic resources for page-based, book-based lyric poetry tend to show up in a nation’s history after other art forms (oral storytelling, epic, the novel, popular song) evolve.

She saw, too, that all the American poets she loved (even Whitman!) did not isolate themselves from the literature of other, often older, nations and cultures and languages. The monoglot nature of so many English-speaking Americans (including aspiring writers) drove her to distraction, though never despair. She read, and could speak, fluent Spanish, and had reading fluency in Latin and Portuguese: she knew those languages belonged to America, too.

She also saw that K-12 teachers, in particular, needed more help to make all those poems (American and otherwise) available, first to themselves, and then to rising generations. And she provided that help. In her last decades of teaching, she devoted some summers to seminars for high school teachers, so that these teachers—serious, inquisitive, sometimes inexperienced—could take what they learned from her back to young people who might then learn to read not one poem each by Dickinson, Frost, and Hughes, but the poetry of Dickinson and Frost and Hughes and Whitman and others during the school year.

LOA: “The writers who last well beyond their own era persist because other serious writers have admired them,” wrote Vendler. What chains of influence in American poetry did she identify across time, and how did she view the process of “canonization” in the arts?

SB: Skeptically, just as she viewed any organized, top-down, authority-figures-tell-you-what’s-what canon. Sometimes she wrote about her own considered (and trustworthy) judgements as if they were facts, the way the atomic weight of fluorine or the structure of DNA are facts, because she had neither the time nor the patience to append footnotes re: the epistemological status of truth claims in the arts to every argument that she advanced.

But she knew, and she liked to insist, that each generation of poets and readers can and must figure out for itself what’s beautiful, and what’s valuable, for them, what we want to pass on, what we choose to re-read. The longue durée, I think, has proven her right. Otherwise we’d still read acres of James Russell Lowell, and Lorine Niedecker would go unread.

Vendler at home in Cambridge, MA (Stephanie Mitchell / The Harvard Gazette)

LOA: Nobody, Vendler said, is born understanding string quartets or sonnets, and without academics, there would be no perpetuation and transmission of culture. Can you comment on the mutual necessity of art and response in Vendler’s thinking? How did she frame the relationship between poet and critic?

SB: Art solicits responses: responses spark new art. See Elizabeth Bishop’s “Poem (About the size of an old-style dollar bill)” for a model, or (if you prefer) Hughes’s great “Theme for English B.” Or Frost’s “The Most of It,” or Wordsworth’s Boy of Winander. Scholars matter to this age-old, always continuing process because scholarship makes the work of the dead more easily available as a resource for the living.

Sometimes that scholarship manifests as translation (see Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”). Sometimes it’s explication or analysis or textual recovery or even just reference-explaining: if you want to understand Blake’s “The Lamb” as thoroughly as Vendler did, you need to know what a catechism is. The art forms and genres that spoke to her, that moved her, all came from what we call, these days, high culture: high-prestige forms (though they were not always so) that most Americans discover in schools. That’s a contingent fact about poets and poetry, not a necessary one.

Her body of work as a critic makes—at least for me—the best possible case for critics in the academy, because it makes the best possible demonstration of how her favorite poets, from Shakespeare to Stevens to Graham or Ford, can deepen, and ground, and unsettle, real people’s real lives.

Stephanie Burt is a poet, literary critic, and professor with nine published books, including two critical books on poetry and three poetry collections. Her essay collection Close Calls with Nonsense was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other works include We Are Mermaids; Advice from the Lights; The Poem is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them; The Art of the Sonnet; Something Understood: Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler; The Forms of Youth: Adolescence and 20th Century Poetry; Parallel Play: Poems; Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden; and Randall Jarrell and His Age. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The Believer, and the Boston Review.