Helen Vendler, a professor of English at Harvard for several decades, died on 23 April 2024 at the age of ninety. She wrote books on Herbert, Keats, Dickinson, Yeats, Stevens and Heaney, among other poets, as well as editing several critical editions and anthologies. ‘It is Vendler’s supreme critical virtue,’ Tom Paulin wrote in the LRB in 1998, reviewing The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ‘that she can write from inside a poem, as if she is in the workshop witnessing its making.’ James Wood called her ‘the most powerful poetry critic in America since Randall Jarrell’.
Twenty years ago, Andrew Motion, one of Philip Larkin’s literary executors, wrote a scholarly and comprehensive authorised biography of the poet, whom he had known well; it was subtitled ‘A Writer’s Life’. Motion informed his readers that some important ingredients of Larkin’s life were still unavailable, especially most of the letters written to Monica Jones,...
One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted – One need not be a House – The Brain has Corridors – surpassing Material Place – ‘All men say “What”...
When Seamus Heaney left Belfast in 1972, to work as a freelance writer in the relative safety of the Republic, Northern Ireland was a war zone. Internment and Bloody Sunday had recruited so many...
Recently I was teaching a poem by Yeats that has always reminded me of a stretched sonnet. ‘In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz’ has an octave of 20 lines and a sestet of...
Helen Vendler has the power to steal poets and enslave them in her personal canon. For this she is squeezed between rival condescensions: theorists pity her comprehensibility, while in creative...
Professor Vendler’s soul is in peril. Reviewing Black American broadsides in 1974, she found it ‘sinful that anthologies and Collected Works should betray the poems they print by...
Perhaps as a result of the lingering Symbolist inheritance, the aesthetic notion of most potency at present is the idea that the work of art is in some sense about itself. Even in the fine arts,...
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