Eratosphere - Helen Vendler

Eratosphere (https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/index.php)

- The Discerning Eye -- Opinions & Criticism (https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/forumdisplay.php?f=27)

- - Helen Vendler (https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=9481)

Yes, the book's a slog, and there are places where she seems to say little in many words. Apart from anything else, I wouldn't want to ready 154 essays on the sonnets by the same critic, and not all the sonnets are worth a detailed commentary.

I don't own it, and it's been a while since I read part of it, but for me it had many revelations. The emphasis on reading the sonnets as utterances -- e.g. 116 as a point-by-point rebuttal of an pronouncement (offstage, but deducable) by the addressee, or 34 as one side of an ongoing argument. Her observation of repeated words, the so-called couplet ties and keywords. Her conjecture that "Feeding..." is the missing foot from 146.

She reminds me of Empson, who I also find exhausting, excessively analytical, and verbose.

I love her interpretation of the sonnets. Revelatory as Brian says. I remember a hostile reviewer citing a recording of Pasternak reading, I think, no. 107 and his voice breaking on "tyrant's crests" - quite how that refuted Vendler's approach was a mystery to me. The meanings and the patterns aren't at odds.

On an earlier thread about Vendler I quoted this from Bruce Bawer:

T

Quote:

The lamentable consequence of such an approach is to make Whitman sound less like Whitman than like Helen Vendler. It is one thing for a critic to write about poems in the language of a critic; it is another for a critic to write about poets as if they thought like critics. Whatever genuine insights Vendler may have into a poem's form and meaning are rendered considerably less valuable by her thorough inability to understand the way a real poetic mind actually goes about creating form and meaning.

I think she has done some good criticism; her books on Stevens, for example. But she has very narrow tastes when it comes to contemporary poetry. Everything ends up getting compared with Stevens and Ashbery. And (as I also mentioned on an earlier thread) she left out Hecht from the Faber (possibly Princeton in America) anthology of American Poetry. That is to say, Rita Dove and Jorie Graham were considered more important.

Oh, her book on George Herbert is good too. At least she doesn't want him to sound like Ashbery.

I had Helen Vendler as a professor for a course in "The Lyric" when I was a graduate M.A. student at Boston University in the 1970s. Given that she ruined my lovely 4.0 grade point average with an A minus, you might take my impressions with a grain of salt, but . . . It was essentially an undergraduate lecture course that grad students could take with extra coursework requirements. Although its title was "The Lyric," she focused mainly on George Herbert, the poet she was doing her research on at the time. (I didn't love Herbert when I was 22, though I did fall in love with him years later, when I'd matured enough to understand where he was coming from.) I was surprised by how often she would diagram Herbert's sentences on the blackboard, to show the relationships of the parts of speech--she seemed to approach poems from a logical/sentence-oriented perspective (rather than as lines/sounds/images), which is perhaps why she is such a good close reader of poems. When it comes to "difficult" poets such as Ashbery or Graham, there is certainly no one better at decoding them.