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.
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