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.