Helen Vendler and the Recognition of Black Poetry.
Reflections on the death of a great critic.
I am publishing this today rather than Wednesday as per the usual schedule—and, for now, keeping the paywall off—because Helen Vendler died one week ago and I want to write about her work as soon as possible while the news is fresh. Great critics like Vendler deserve our attention and the news cycle moves quickly.
The next Shakespeare bookclub is now **19th May**—it was pointed out that 12th is Mothers’ Day in the USA… sorry!
Canonic defender
After Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler, who died last week, was one of the most prominent literary critics in America. She wrote, in close detail, about the major lyric poets: Yeats, Stevens, Keats, Shakespeare, Heaney, Herbert, Whitman, and so on. Her reviews appeared frequently in major publications. She was, for many years, a Harvard professor. This extract from a profile in the Harvard Gazette neatly summarises how impressive Vendler was.
She is the author or editor of 31 books, her first in 1963; earned her Ph.D. in English and American literature at Harvard in 1960, after studying chemistry and mathematics as an undergraduate at Emmanuel College and winning a Fulbright fellowship; and taught at Cornell, Swarthmore, Haverford, Smith, and Boston University before returning to Harvard in 1985. In 1990 she became the first woman to be named a University Professor.
Vendler spoke her first word at 9 months; wrote her first “poem” at 6 (a writing pursuit replaced by her dissertation at 26); learned Spanish, French, and Italian before age 12; roamed eagerly through the stacks at Widener Library while still in her Catholic girls’ school uniform (“I was a sight,” she said); and as a high school senior wrote what she calls with some amusement “my first book” — a 40-page exploration of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
A scholar, then, of the establishment, of vigorous intelligence, with a mind of broad powers but also great intensity. Vendler became the sort of critic who represented the tradition. She was an opponent of political literary criticism written by the new schools of theorists, feminists, Marxists and so on. She wanted no moralising of literature, whether in the old pseudo-priestly conservative manner or the new politico-theoretic-radical way.
This makes her comparable to Harold Bloom in other ways than their fame. Though not a Bloomian in temperament or method, Vendler respected Bloom, and he her. She called him the foremost critic of his generation; he called her the ultimate close reader. Vendler and Bloom both argued against the inclusive changes to curricula and anthologies. Few poets are truly great, Vendler believed and we must prioritise those who are, irrespective of their demographics. They were primarily aesthetic critics, not moral, philosophical, or political ones (though Bloom was much broader, and more philosophic, than Vendler.)
Vendler’s belief in the canon stems from her time at a Catholic University where she was unable to read the major French authors.
I tried the concentration in French in my second year and discovered that in the survey of French literature, you couldn’t read the authors you’d have expected, because they were all on the Index of Forbidden Books. No books by Voltaire, Diderot, Pascal, Proust, Flaubert, Baudelaire. They were all on the Index (which subsequently was abolished).
My parents wouldn’t let me leave Emmanuel, and I thought “I have to go into a field where they can’t corrupt the curriculum.” So I went into science: I became a chemistry major, and took the requisite physics and biology and mathematics courses, enjoying it all very much because it couldn’t be corrupted: it was truthful.
You see how central the idea of truth is to her, not just in academic and curricula terms, but as a way of understanding poetry. Who else could have said this: “Geometry, with its shapes and volumes, taught me about poetic structure, and so did organic chemistry, because of the variety of structures of three-dimensional molecules.” So, Vendler learned the principles of her criticism before she ever studied literature at university. She is always a critic who sees the form and structure as essential to understand the mood and symbolism, as a way of revealing the truth of the poem
Unlike Bloom, this meant Vendler had quite strict, narrow ideas about poetic interpretation. Her study of structures meant that she wanted to follow the “internal shape changes” and see how the ideas in a poem evolve and develop. In a mixed but admiring admiring review of Bloom’s Yeats book she wrote,
That petulant wish for logical coherence and unassailable transitions is simply foolish when visited on lyric poetry, and on quasi-Romantic poetry above all: Keats knew what he was about in condemning an “irritable reaching after fact and reason.”1
She often expressed this narrowness forcefully. In a review of several books that offer feminist (or non-feminist) approaches to literature, including Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, for example, Vendler wrote:
Literature makes its own verbal universe, and its fundamental organizing structures are not documentary, thematic, or ideological ones. The lifting of the documentary into the symbolic, of the thematic into the syntactic, is the task of art. Disregarding its most fundamental transformations does it poor service. Perhaps that is why books that round up literature behind thematic fences—religion, politics, women, sexual personae—are usually reductive of the genres they treat.
The skittish imagination mocks these attempts to bind it down; language’s fertile misrule mocks such feeble taxonomies. The imp of the perverse, the Muse of the unpredictable next line, laughs, of course, at us all. But while criticism tags her footsteps, it needs to follow her with at least some respect for accuracy and evidence and considered judgment. It needs to understand the reworking of (and disregard for) the documentary that is necessary to literature’s symbolic intent. Criticism might also aim for concepts and language that do not violate the supple aims of imaginative work. More highly evolved feminist criticism may be on the way, but it will have to go beyond its current practitioners’ innocence about how the imagination works, and what it does.
That forcefulness created a row in 2011 when Vendler reviewed Rita Dove’s anthology of twentieth-century poetry.
“Multicultural inclusiveness prevails”
Vendler’s review of Dove’s anthology was decisive: not enough Frost and Stevens, and too much second rate poetry that was included not on aesthetic grounds but because the writers were Black. Here’s a taste:
Multicultural inclusiveness prevails: some 175 poets are represented. No century in the evolution of poetry in English ever had 175 poets worth reading, so why are we being asked to sample so many poets of little or no lasting value? Anthologists may now be extending a too general welcome. Selectivity has been condemned as “elitism,” and a hundred flowers are invited to bloom.
After complaining about Dove’s preference for “accessible” poems, Vendler took her to task for not including enough Wallace Stevens (Vendler’s favourite poet), but instead giving space to another, and, in Vendler view’s, much lesser, writer.
… she chooses to represent Wallace Stevens by five plain-voiced poems from his first book, Harmonium (1923), and one short posthumously published poem (1957), skipping more than thirty years of Stevens’s powerfully influential writing. Did Dove feel that only these poems would be graspable by the audience she wishes to reach? Or is it that she admires Stevens less than she admires Melvin Tolson, who receives fourteen pages to Stevens’s six? Or is it that she believes that Stevens has had more than enough exposure, and that he doesn’t really need any more?
Unsurprisingly, this turned into one of the more controversial episodes in poetry criticism of recent times. (Cynthia Haven wrote an excellent summary of the whole affair.) The effects are still felt. It was only in her final hour that Vendler was reconciled with Dove. (She hugely admired Dove’s own poetry.)
When the news of Vendler’s death came out, Hollis Robbins, a scholar of African American literature, said this ,
In remembering Helen Vendler I also remember the poems she thought forgettable, in her critique of Rita Dove's inclusive anthology. Vendler’s preferred genealogy left a wide opening for scholars of Black poetry. RIP and thank you.
Robbins has written a book about African American sonnets (which I have recommended before) and edited an anthology of nineteenth century Black women’s writing (ditto). So she knows what she’s talking about.
No Black poets?
Was Vendler simply uninterested in poetry written by Black authors? Can it possible be true that among the twentieth-century greats there were no African American writers?
Vendler is right about the canon. One day soon you are going to die and it matters that you have read and known the best and most important works. Vendler was arguing, for much of her career, against people who didn’t believe in those canonical ideas; sometimes she presumably did feel that she was defending the canon from diminishment rather than prevent it from being expanded, which is always shall be.
Vendler was right about aesthetics. Political ideas about poetry do lead you into critical opinions that are not literary. Admiring a piece of writing for its content or the demographic background of its author is not just unliterary but anti literary.
But, Vendler was also wrong. There are Black American poets who have a place in the canon. In her review of Dove’s anthology, Vendler listed the following writers as the great twentieth century American poets: T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop. It cannot possibly be her serious claim that writers like Claude McKay, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, and Langston Hughes don’t merit consideration on this list.
I want to argue that even by Vendler’s own narrow critical standards, those writers earn their pages alongside Frost, Williams, and Lowell. They clearly meet the aesthetic criteria of great lyric writing. To demonstrate this I will look closely at a few poems by Hughes and one by Hayden.
Vendler’s critical ideas
First, let’s establish some of Vendler’s core critical beliefs.
the claim to poetical honours
Vendler believed that few poets were truly great. In 1994, reviewing The Oxford Companion to 20th Century Poetry in English, she said,
In 2500 AD, if the world is still here… the 1500 poets here included will have shrunk to about fifty, and a good thing too. The small ‘mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease’ has now swollen to a throng of men and women who write with intent, and this reader, at least, shrinks before the sheer weight of publication represented by these 1500 writers of verse.
Note that Vendler here expects fifty poets to last, which is many more than the nine she listed in her review of Dove’s anthology. What she really wants from critics is for them to be highly selective. So the first principle is that we give most attention to the greatest writers. I will name this principle, borrowing a phrase from Samuel Johnson, as “the claim to poetical honours.”
stylized temperament
That review offers some other critical criteria. Vendler is a critic of form and how it relates to content. Here she is explaining why line breaks are so essential to poetry.
Real poetry (by contrast with the versified prose that fills pages of contemporary anthologies) needs segmentation precisely because it changes direction so often, as ‘efficient’ prose does not. A ‘good’ line-break in a poem always reflects a change of direction — an alteration in tone, a veering of glance, a shift in metaphor, a speed-up or slow-down in pacing, a new addition to a list. Poetry can thus be defined (in one sense) as prose written for maximum inefficiency. The well-known concision and even hermeticism of poetry (‘real’ poetry) stems precisely from this ‘inefficiency’ in conveying information (while aiming at maximum efficiency in emotional kinaesthesia). An autobiographical incident which has been made into a poem exists not to reveal incident (as it would had it been made into a story) but to reveal, one might say, the EEG of its speaker, tracked precisely by the veerings and tackings of lineation.
We could take several things from this, but the two important elements are: the primacy of the line, and the emotional, rather than informational, nature of poetry. In an admiring review of Rita Dove’s poetry, Vendler said that lyric poems “stylize temperament in language.” So we can call this principle “stylized temperament”.
As she said in that Harvard interview, “poems are usually taught, mistakenly, as embodiments of ideas rather than enactments of a mobile consciousness.” The use of “profound technique” to embody moods is what Vendler thinks poetry is all about. She described the Yeats poem “The Moods” as a touchstone.
Time drops in decay,
Like a candle burnt out,
And the mountains and the woods
Have their day, have their day;
What one in the rout
Of the fire-born moods
Has fallen away?
the lifting of the documentary into the symbolic
In her Oxford Companion review, Vendler went on to outline another principle of criticism,
… the third act of criticism — which comes after a consideration of themes and imagery, and after a glance at external and internal forms — is an investigation into how the poet’s imagination works to redefine the topics common to lyric (family, love, memory etc) in symbolic form. It may be that the family has been seen as a gulag, or love as a game, or memory as a treadmill — no matter what. In short, theme untransformed is theme unimagined. If I recommend the first act of identifying theme and imagery, the second act of describing form, and the third act of analysing imaginative transumption, it is so that an author’s originality can be at least partially represented.
This principle can be summed up with a line from the review I quoted earlier: poetry is “the lifting of the documentary into the symbolic.”
the beautiful bizarre
Finally, Vendler wants criticism to be artistic, not dry. She sees criticism as a very personal activity: “each critic attaches himself differently to literature”, she said in “The Function of Criticism”. Style matters; style is how we know a writer’s motives and aims. Vendler said critics, ideally, are artists thinking dispassionately, or an artist-manqué. This leads to the final principle:
the critic who is an artist manqué will himself be looking for the beautiful bizarre, not the beautiful familiar… the beautiful new is always bizarre: in Wordsworth’s more sedate formulation, the artist must create the taste by which he is enjoyed.
Hence Vendler’s insistence that a true aesthetic criticism must “describe the wonderful art is such a way that it cannot be confused with any other work of art… and to infer from its elements the aesthetic that might generate this unique configuration.” So the final principle is “the beautiful bizarre.”
in summary
So, we have four principles of Vendlerian criticism:
The claims to poetical honours—critics must identify the greatest writers based on aesthetic criteria.
Stylized temperament—lyric poems enact consciousness and mood.
The lifting of the documentary into the symbolic—poems are not rational records of experience, but forms of art that transform experience.
The beautiful bizarre—aesthetic criticism must search for the strangeness of great new art.
What do I mean by aesthetic criticism?
This could be another long essay in itself. Let a quotation from one of Keats’ letters suffice. (This is a passage Vendler has quoted.)
1st. I think poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity; It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
2d. Its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby making the reader breathless, instead of content. The rise, the progress, the setting of Imagery should, like the sun, seem natural to him, shine over him, and set soberly, although in magnificence, leaving him in the luxury of twilight.
So, in short: a fine excess, that appears to the reader almost as a remembrance, with a progress of images as natural as the rising and setting of the sun.
Langston Hughes
Let’s start with a short lyric by Langston Hughes, “Boogies: 1 a.m.”
Good evening, daddy!
I know you’ve heard
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred
Trilling the treble
And twining the bass
Into midnight ruffles
Of cat-gut lace.
This immediately meets Vendler’s criteria: the poet is recording, initially, the words of who, a child or a playful adult? The tone suddenly tilts in the fourth line—boogie-woogie rumble might be the words of a child, but a dream deferred? Is the father allowing his own melancholy to repurpose the child’s speech or is this when we realise the speaker is stranger, more uncanny than we knew, a fellow musician talking? The hint of nonsense speak, or light verse, now emerges and retreats through the remaining lines, until the bizarre and the romantic are joined at the end, the bathos of the final plain description “cat-gut lace” being transformed into something like the temporary deferment of plangent melancholy. The dream-deferred has been acknowledged, just, but the recollection of the music serves as a second deferment. Whatever disappointment lurks here, whoever it is who has sensed it, has been forestalled—but not forgotten.
Hughes catches this mood in other musical poems, such as in these lines from “Blues on a Box”.
Play your guitar boy,
Till yesterday’s
Black cat
Runs out tomorrow’s back door
Now look at “Cross”, another poem where Hughes conjoins the simple sense almost of nursery rhyme, and uses it to progress into something darker.
My old man’s a white old man
And my old mother’s black.
If ever I cursed my white old man
I take my curses back.If ever I cursed my black old mother
And wished she were in hell,
I’m sorry for that evil wish
And now I wish her well.My old man died in a fine big house.
My ma died in a shack.
I wonder where I’m gonna die,
Being neither white nor black?
Is this not raising the documentary into the symbolic? Is this not the new bizarre of the nursery rhyme turned into a personal lyric that allegorises American history and politics?
Sometimes, Hughes writes more directly, more politically, such as in “Who But The Lords?” or “Daybreak in Alabama”. I don’t think these works can be admired under Vendler’s criteria, but they can be usefully compared to something like “Blues” by Derek Walcott to see how Hughes became a major influence on later writers.
Vendler was always keen to show the chains of influence, and she is never more enlivening than when she shows, for example, the way that “At The Fishhouses” by Elizabeth Bishop has roots in Keats “To Autumn” and the hermit figures of Wordsworth. We should note that Hughes and many other African American writers were influenced by the same poetic tradition as Bishop and Stevens, which Hollis Robbins traces in Forms of Contention. Hughes is not a deviation from the lyric tradition that Vendler studied but a reinvention of it.
And that is even more true of the next poet I propose to add to Vendler’s list of twentieth century greats—Robert Hayden.
Robert Hayden
Hayden is one of the great lyric poets of the twentieth century, perhaps the name I am most surprised Vendler left off her list, along with Gwendolyn Brooks. (Along with Hughes, Hayden is listed in Bloom’s list of canonical authors of the twentieth century.) There are many Hayden poems we could review, such as the popular sonnet “Those Winter Sundays”, but his less-known “Ice Storm” will show how much he works in the great tradition of the lyric.
Unable to sleep, or pray, I stand
by the window looking out
at moonstruck trees a December storm
has bowed with ice.Maple and mountain ash bend
under its glassy weight,
their cracked branches falling upon
the frozen snow.The trees themselves, as in winters past,
will survive their burdening,
broken thrive. And am I less to You,
my God, than they?
How many echoes we can hear in this poem. It is, foremost, influenced by Frost, not just in the use of ice, but in the bent trees and their cracked branches, which echo “Birches”,
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
The resonances are obvious—glass, shattering and cracking, the snow—but there are subtle connections too. Hayden has invoked prayer in the opening line, and Frost’s word “heaven” lingers in the background of Hayden’s reference. Think too of the way that throughout Frost’s work, literally in the first and last poems of his Collected Poems, as well as famous works like “Stopping by Woods”, trees are symbolised darkly, as places where the poet gets away, where he retreats, possibly not to come back.
There are deeper references. Like Larkin, a few years later, Hayden surely refers to Philip Sydney’s sonnets with “moonstruck”. “With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies!” Hayden is a master sonneteer, and though this poem is twelve lines, it has the traditional sonnet’s theme of unrequited love—only in this case religious not romantic.
This makes the specific trees Hayden mentions meaningful. Here is Frost’s final poem,
In winter in the woods alone
Against the trees I go.
I mark a maple for my own
And lay the maple low.At four o’clock I shoulder axe
And in the afterglow
I link a line of shadowy tracks
Across the tinted snow.I see for Nature no defeat
In one tree’s overthrow
Or for myself in my retreat
For yet another blow.
Frost’s maple is a symbol of his conquering the darkness of the woods in his first ever poem, when he writes of the trees stretching to the edge of doom and him disappearing into them. The maple in Hayden, though, is seen by moonlight. Hayden is kept apart. The mountain ash is another name for a rowan, a tree that appears in Frost’s poem “Iris by Night”, an account of two walkers who come across a rainbow—a “moon-made prismatic bow”—which then rises up and encircles them. “We were vouchsafed the miracle,” Frost writes. Rowans were burnt by druids to summon spirits, and Hayden refers to the tree here to enforce the lack of summoning, the lack of prayer. He is unable to find revelation.
Frost’s Iris poem alludes to Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life”, with the invocation of Iris, the crystal, the bent trees all recurring. The description Shelley gives leads up to these lines, which capture the Romantic suspense Frost and Hayden find themselves caught up in,
A light from Heaven whose half extinguished beam
Through the sick day in which we wake to weep
Glimmers, forever sought, forever lost.
The final echoes of influence resolve the tension. In the closing lines “And am I less to You,/ my God, than they?” Milton suddenly appears in Hayden’s poem. This refers to the famous sonnet “When I consider how my light is spent”. Milton has fretted that his talents are “lodged with me useless” because of his blindness, “though my Soul more bent/ To serve therewith my Maker.” Note that important word bent, which links Hayden’s rowan and maple to Frost’s birches back to Milton’s soul. Hayden is echoing Frost, but under the strong influence of Milton, making more explicitly Christian what in Frost sometimes seems pagan or merely “spiritual”. Shelley’s gloom is obviated by Hayden’s faith.
God’s answer to Milton is that “bearing his mild yoke” is also a form of service, and Hayden’s poem resolves the tension between speaker and trees by realising that both are bearing the mild yoke—the trees of the ice, Hayden of his spiritual loneliness. He finally seems to reject Frost’s rugged isolationism. He will not go and lay the maple low. They also serve who only stand and wait. He can “broken thrive”.
Anthologising and reviewing
The funny thing about Vendler’s review is that she was in fact admiring of writers like these. But her concern was to correct what she saw as the errors of Dove’s criticism and to defend, for the common reader, access to the very best writing. Dove said Brooks was as good as any male poet. As good as Shakespeare and Dante? Vendler rebuts. Fine. A legitimate response, especially from someone of Vendler’s views. (One I very much agree with.) But—but—Vendler could have done more.
Towards the end, Vendler wrote this:
One wants the contemporary poets of Dove’s collection to ask more of their language, to embody more planes of existence, to dip and pivot like the seagull. There are such poets living now, but they are either absent or in short supply in this book.
Though I agree with the broad thrust of Vendler’s review, and am pleased the anthologies I found when I was young did concentrate on the greatest works, I wanted Vendler to say more about this, to offer her own sample, and to show the reader that writers like Hughes and Hayden are very much the equal of other writers.
Vendler had bigger concerns. Her critique of Dove’s preference for “demotic” “accessible” poetry, rather than the longer, more difficult works, was part of her broader dissatisfaction with poetic culture. (And yes, it is true, we live in a culture that prefers simple poetry. Whenever I see someone compare Taylor Swift to the Romantic poets, I wonder if they have read any of Shelley’s longer works.) But, on the narrow point of picking the best names, Vendler could have shown that Dove was right to want to expand the list, even if she disagreed with the choices.
As a great critic, Vendler quite capable of this. Sometimes, opposing political criticism can become too forceful, and ends up becoming, perhaps inadvertently, a political stance itself. In an anthology Vendler produced in 1997, she did include Hughes and Hayden, as well as Dove, Walcott, Brooks, Dunbar. And alongside Shakespeare and Wordsworth, too.
Maybe it’s time for that anthology to be republished, in Vendler’s memory. In some ways, it represents Vendler better than her most notorious review. And it might serve readers more helpfully. For now, though, her book can only stand and wait.
The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Oct., 1971), pp. 691-696
I appreciate you turning my tweet into real and thorough engagement with some of the poets. Vendler was great but there is a way all great critics *must* be blind to inconvenient texts.