The poem within the poem
The new book of Helen Vendler's essays
A great critic must subordinate themselves to the poem. All critics, however scholarly or credentialed or admired, are self authorized. But they derive their power from poems. Whatever power the critic obtains it is not the power of prose style or commanding ideas—those are the surface, too often, of fashion, and the allurements of proclamation. Literature doesn’t care for mere assertions of critical style. Literature makes no peace with insistent popularity. Art is what it is: the true critic serves the art. Once they go beyond that aim, what they are writing is no long criticism. So much of the swathes of cultural commentary, so-called polemic, incessantly political or personal essays, so many exercises in shocking technique—all that witty, clever-clever, stuff that makes people names and get them clicks—so much of it has passed beyond criticism. It might be journalism, it might be something else; it might call itself criticism, but it is incessant ephemera, not criticism in service to the poem.
Inhabit the Poem, a posthumous collection of the essays Helen Vendler wrote for Liberties, is a beautiful, brief, final statement from a great critic of the old school, which arrives in these days of glib, garish, fluent narcissism—where everyone wants to have a voice—with no greater intent than to make honest readings of great poems. In her scholarly books, Vendler sometimes read more closely than some readers can tolerate. These essays, contrariwise, are perfectly pitched to the common reader. Vendler never shies from quoting and explicating verse, but she also brings in anecdote, biography, history, a little personal comment, illuminating ideas—anything that helps the reader to see the poem for what it is. There is no other agenda.
Vendler has no theory, politics, ideology, or other extra-poetic preoccupation. She does not get caught in the dogma of cliche. She never holds forth about neoliberalism, Freud, modern attitudes, the state of the world, nor does she free associate, nor surmise, nor gesture. Vendler knows the meanings, and histories of meanings, of words; she traces allusions; she shows what context the poet brings in or leaves out; she reads the poet are carefully as she can.
Her tone has something high and formal about it, but she is bracketed and lurking too, sometimes talking as plainly as a cook. She doesn’t proclaim herself, but enters quietly, with the intent of directing us to the words under review. She explains rather than declaims.
Like all good critics, Vendler quotes carefully, vividly, specifically, noticingly. She has the jeweler’s eye for selecting and presenting. She is not resolutely impersonal, but brings herself in as a reader. Rather than using theories of literature (grand, incorporating, totalising) she is a critic of principles (flexible, guiding, open). She knows, as Johnson said, that there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature.
Vendler wishes not to summarise the poem, but to explain it by experiencing it.
…when a strange new poet appears, it is not so much the message of the poetry that I hope to describe as the manner in which the message reaches us. How does the new voice create itself and what elements are implicitly being chosen or rejected as it speaks and we listen.
Vendler is canonical, interested in “poems that can interest readers over centuries”, which perpetuality she attributes to the “eager and difficult renovation of language” that great poets achieve. She quotes Stevens to reinforce her view that the summarizable idea of a poem (such as “the evils of war”) is “always banal” because the summary ignores what was “re-created by the poet’s imagination”. Stevens:
Every poem is a poem within a poem: the poem of the idea within the poem of the words.
Vendler’s love and care for the life of the poem is what sends in her in quest of the poem within the poem—the specific, idiosyncratic, uniqueness of expression. These thirteen short essays are about poets such as Brontë, Cowper, Haydn, Moore, Whitman, Blake, Hopkins—and even Ocean Vuong, whose work left Vendler “set back on my heels.” Vendler’s accumulated life of knowledge and feel for poetry makes every page a pleasure to read. She forced me to reconsider Vuong, nearly made me interested in Blake, and gripped me with a piece about Emily Brontë, Dickinson, and their influence on Hardy and Eliot and Ashbery. It was my favourite of all the pieces, full of the quiet intensity that makes Vendler such a rewarding critic. Alas that we shall have no more of her.
And here is my previous essay about Vendler and Black poetry.
Helen Vendler and the Recognition of Black Poetry.
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.