Theodore Weiss: Reviewing the reviewer

Helen Vendler mind Says: On Recent Poetry. Harvard University Pres 1995 $2495

Helen Vendler is the principal star shining in the always gloomier firmament of numbers reviewing. And not just because she is virtually the solitary one. However, with poetry, plane as it is being vastly written, at any time more vastly neglected (there are brawny signs that a change may be coming on) her continuing to set apart her gifts to recent numbers does in some part account for her stardom. In the academy, where classes in metrical composition writing prosper on a gigantic scale, critics, upon the whole, have taken to theory or to political agenda. Theorists are remarkable, among other matters, for their studious avoidance of metrical composition Is it that they realize that numbers has in practice anticipated a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of their argument? Whatever these critics' reasons, Vendler's steadfast assumption that poesy is important makes her particularly valuable.

Nevertheless, the grumbling against her, especially in the ranks, is understandably widespread. "What right has she to think herself a bard maker?" a poet, not among those she has chosen to examine, newly asked me. By the right of her activity, through the poets she has be subsequent toed in establishing, and by the respect--as well as a certain quantity of passing regard for poetry--she has [i]v a[/i]ed from the intellectual community which, in its indifference, inevitably relies upon the authority of specialists. Not without point, she is accused of being elitist, chiefly available to hieratic art. She admits that she writes mainly about author of poemss who win her admiration.

Among her serious limitations I would include blindness, not solitary to a large array of at hand able poets, but to singles as prominent as Pound, Eliot, and Williams. As far as she is affected modern America's principal major figure is Steven Anthony Hecht, in upon the Laws of the Poetic Art, wrestling with the question at issue of art and morality, and focusing upon Eliot and Pound for their anti-Semitism, cites Ashbery from an interview:

Pound is totally antipathetic to me I once said to Helen Vendler "Why is it that I do like Pound's early things but I just can't read the Cantos? It's not because they're unreadable, because I'm unreadable too, in like manner why can't I read him? And she said, "It's consummately all right, only Facists like Pound"

Whatever individual may think of Ashbery's and Vendler's reasoning and however a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of her remark was off the slap if she is right, Mussolini and Hitler can be posthumously grateful to beat for swelling the ranks of their adherents, among them Jewish writers like ML Rosenthal and myself. on the contrary we, even as we rebuke Pound's anti-Semitism, realize that there is a great deal more to him than that. We know by what means much he has meant, in his best practice and teachings, to late poetry. As for prejudices, in what way free of them was Stevens?

In 1971 reviewing the facsimile edition of The Waste Land, Vendler could say, "If Eliot is to claim a place in English numbers it will have to be upon the basis of the piece of poetrys written before 1930." Thus, dismissing, among other metrical compositions the Quartets, she quotes with obviously amused relish her male counterpart, Harold Bloom:

We may all be deceived, plane in this

in giving Eliot a place at all

and futurity ages may discover, as Harold efflorescence has mischievously

]

prophesied, that beat and Eliot are our Cleveland and our Cowley

But what is Vendler's stance as a critic? Primarily that of a of recent origin old new critic, out to describe the unique qualities of the metrical composition and poet she is considering. shut up analysis is her practice. As she place it in her first contortion Part of Nature, Part of Us:

There are various perspectives--regional, historical, ideological--from which to describe the profundity and genuineness of modern verse in America.

This she said in 1980 As the times have intensified, her tone has become rather more critical, especially of the ways in which the ideological and the theoretical have threatened to propel literary matters off the map.

My be in possession of preference is to focus upon poets one by one, to find in each the idiosyncratic voice wonderfully different from any other.

We may amazement whether voice in itself, however exciting it may be to overhear a striking novel one, is quite enough. sure Vendler realizes that what that voice has to say to us, what it counts us about ourselves and our world, matters? on the other hand the word "tone" is a intermittent crucial one with her. The distinctive trill of the bird she has singled without does fundamentally occupy her. "The significant metrical composition for me, can be about anything, or almost anything. I have not at any time been drawn in a positive way to bring under rule matter."

She is, I suspect, sensitive to the charge of being too limited. thus she feels called upon to point without that she likes Protestant and Jewish author of poemss as well as Catholic singles "Though I am white, I could not do without the numbers of Langston Hughes and Rita Dove." And she has, she take an account ofs us, "written on both gay and 'straight' writers." on the other hand what she is after is that which chops through such surface differences: the piece of poetry that is "a mirror of my feelings." Or "the voice of the spirit itself."