Vendler has done some good criticism - her two books on Stevens, for instance - but she has very narrow views on what constitutes good contemporary poetry. If you read her books on recent poetry everything is always being compared with Stevens and Ashbery, even when there is absolutely no connection. And she's one of those who's always banging on about the superiority of American colloquial, as if there were no such thing as British colloquial (and as if everything must always be colloquial). There's a good essay on her by Bruce Bawer which concludes with the sentence: "While Helen Vendler, in short, is not a thoroughly bad critic, it is without question a thoroughly bad thing that she wields such unparalleled influence upon the direction of American poetry in our time."
After all, what can you say to someone who didn't include Hecht in the Faber (or Harvard) Book of Contemporary American Poetry (that is to say, she favoured Jorie Graham and Rita Dove over him)?
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