The Three Acts of Criticism

Helen Vendler

The Oxford Companion to 20th-Century Poetry in English edited by Ian Hamilton
Oxford, 602 pp, £25.00, February 1994, ISBN 0 19 866147 9

This handy compilation (to which I myself contributed a couple of notices) covers, according to the jacket copy, ‘some 1500’ poets and ‘charts the shift from “poetry” to “poetries” – from primarily British and American traditions to a rich diversity of younger poetic identities elsewhere’. It may be doubted whether ‘poetry’ is so easily dislodged in favour of ‘poetries’, but no editor is responsible for his jacket copy. Nonetheless, the jacket copy (like the accompanying publicity material) is a test of the current way of marketing poetry; and it is disheartening that after a brief nod to ‘critical assessment’ and ‘biographical and bibliographical information’, the jacket flap launches into its trumpeting conclusion, that ‘20th-century poets have lived far from humdrum lives’:

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Vol. 16 No. 10 · 26 May 1994 » Helen Vendler » The Three Acts of Criticism (print version)
Pages 5-6 | 3416 words

Letters

From B.J. Whelan

Helen Vendler comments on the publishing world’s lack of things to say about poetry, and herself says a great deal which is of considerable value (LRB, 26 May). But her paragraph on the subject of line-breaks contains so many bizarre ideas that it is quite out of character with the rest of her article.

We would find it very odd, she says, in reading prose, to have to stop several times per sentence. We would indeed; and we would find it just as odd to have to stop at the end of each line when reading poetry. You don’t stop at the end of each line, any more than, when reading or reciting prose, you stop at each comma. We might pause if a line break corresponds with an express or implied punctuation mark, but this is not unique to poetry.

Having asserted that there is no one reason for lineation, she then goes on to propose ‘change of direction’ as the sole reason. (I could see no change of direction in the first half-dozen lines of ‘Snipers’, which you publish in the same issue.) Professor Vendler then modifies her yardstick for deciding what is real poetry, to include such lesser devices as ‘a new addition to a list’; but any sentence which contains more than a simple main clause will answer to these criteria. She also contrasts the inefficiency of real poetry with the efficiency of prose. She does not offer a definition of efficiency, though this may be inferred from her reference to the concision and hermeticism of ‘real’ poetry stemming ‘precisely’ from inefficiency in conveying information. What does she mean? Factual information? Information about the poet’s emotion? The poet’s EEG? Could the information in the opening lines of ‘Snipers’ be conveyed any more efficiently?

B.J. Whelan
Farnham, Surrey

From Bruce King

If it is true that ‘in the United States one hears much less about African, Caribbean and Indian poetry than one does in England,’ as Helen Vendler remarks, that may be more the fault of university English departments and American cultural politics than of England’s favoured position as the former centre of the Empire. In Hena Maes-Jelinek’s collection A Shaping of Connections (1989), both the Canadian Robert Robertson and the New Zealander A.L. McLeod trace the long unsuccessful history of individuals and organisations that attempted to introduce Commonwealth literature to American universities. Robertson’s conclusion is still true: ‘They were swamped first by black studies, then women’s studies, then gay literature, neo-Marxist critiques and other fashions in the American academic whirligig.’

Vendler need not depend on anthologists to learn about good English-language post-colonial poets, however. There are American professional organisations devoted to the study of Australian, African and other literatures and there is a good journal of Australian creative writing, Antipodes, edited in Texas. Major Indian poets who live or have lived in America include A.K. Ramanujan, Vikram Seth and Agha Shahid Ali. Because of ‘fashions in the American academic whirligig’ they have been ignored in the hunt for ‘multicultural voices’ which parrot what American academics assume the post-colonial should say.

Bruce King
Muncie, Indiana

From Anne Ashworth

Could copies of Helen Vendler’s sensible and instructive article be sent to all future reviewers of poetry, please?

Anne Ashworth
Blackpool