Helen Vendler Believed Poetry Matters

She was such a ubiquitous presence — the go-to poetry reviewer for serious, nonspecialist publications like The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, The New Yorker and this one — and wrote with such calm, rigorous authority, that some resentment was inevitable. The breadth of her knowledge was formidable, but her taste could seem narrow, her enthusiasm a form of establishment-friendly gatekeeping.

She upheld a canon of the English lyric, of first-person poems grounded in strong feeling, passed down from Shakespeare and George Herbert (she wrote books about both) through the Romantics to moderns like Yeats, Auden and, above all, Wallace Stevens. Many of the contemporary poets she praised, like Merrill and Robert Lowell, could be assimilated to that lineage. She was suspicious of more experimental or avant-garde tendencies, and skeptical of poetry overtly political or overly personal. Her criticism, too, avoided the theoretical leaps and sweeping cultural statements that animated literary discourse in and out of the academy.

But if poetry is worth anything, it is worth getting mad about, and it’s hardly Vendler’s fault that she was a more exacting, better read, and, finally, more generous reader of poetry than most of her critics. (Including this one: The first review I ever published was of two of her books; I remember being awe-struck and impatient, and finally outmatched.)

All of that matters much less now. Reviewing Lowell’s sonnets of the late 1960s and early ’70s, Vendler wrote that “the subjects of these poems will eventually become extinct, like all other natural species devoured by time, but the indelible mark of their impression on a single sensibility will remain.” This is true of her own criticism, which will last alongside the poems she cared about and provide future readers with a path back to them.

And also to the bedrock of her own inexhaustible faith in an art form that is perpetually maligned, ignored and misunderstood. A succinct statement of that belief comes from Wallace Stevens, the poet Vendler loved most and wrote about best. I suspect she would not mind giving him the last word.

The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea … It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning

And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end.