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