Helen Vendler
 

Opinions? Lauds, opprobrium, disgust, idolatry, anecdotes? How is she as a teacher?

(I have learned she is teaching an NEH summer seminar at Harvard on poetry and am considering applying. No reason not to...)

Chris

I sat in on a class of hers at Harvard about 12 years ago. It was on contemporary poetry, and honestly, I hardly remember a thing. But I do recall that her teaching style was lively and engaging. At a poetry reading about that time, by Geoffrey Hill, she huffed: "Too hieratic for me!" At another reading, by Charles Simic and Carolyn Forsché, during Forsché's reading she muttered something about political pretensions. I gave her Edwin Muir's autobiography, to thank her for letting me sit in on her class, and she later commented: "Now poets have to write without grass, without horses," and she explained Muir's visions by blaming them on madness and a hard life.

She is generous and very dedicated to her work and to students. She does light up the place with intellectual energy, and of course she has tremendous erudition which she never hesitates to share.

That said, she likes to flaunt her prestigious position, not always to the benefit of poetry or poets.

I saw her once give a visiting lecture on John Berryman, and I agree with Andrew that she was lively and interesting. The lecture sent me right out to read more Berryman, which is the kind of effect a lecture on poetry should have.

Susan

For her Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets she committed all of them to memory, on the grounds that musicians don't perform with the music in front of them.

Searching this site turns up some harsh words -- nuttier than a fruit bat (...battier than a fruitcake?). They may have been trolls.

Oh. I remember my mother telling me we once lived briefly on the same street as her.

I read the first few chapters of her new book on Yeats. I was pleasantly surprised at how well she grasps the centrality of form in his life. Her explanations of his formal choices (stanza, line length,) are worth reading.

I reviewed a book of hers a few years ago, none too favorably but not entirely negatively either. A cut from the review later showed up on the Harvard UP website as a recommendation! She's a good close reader, but has strange taste when it comes to contemporary poets who aren't alreadly canonized. Her championship of Jorie Graham and Dave Smith makes me suspect her judgment of poets that haven't yet made any kind of critical consensus.

No grasses, no horses? I guess I'm a nineteenth century poet.

I was shocked when she said this to me, and still am when I remember it. You're actually fully 21st century--the language of your poetry proves it. And your poetry proves that Helen Vendler was wrong about horses and grass.

Having heard for so long that she was the doyenne of modern American poetry, I long ago read her anthology of modern poetry, and then much later her book on Shakespeare's Sonnets. To me she is, and has always been, a boring and wrong-headed pedant.

Her book on the sonnets managed to say so little about so much that it was astonishing. Her comments were almost unreadable and, if you made the effort to read them, totally unilluminating. I'm impressed that she memorized the sonnets, but it doesn't do her readers any good.

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:

TI 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.