“... enjoyed being one.’ But was she a riddle that wanted to be solved? Did she want readerly guests? Helen Vendler’s Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries and Lyndall Gordon’s Lives like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds take different positions on this question. In the more ambitious and freewheeling of the two studies, Gordon ...”

“... quite like this. At the other, gentler end of the scale of violence are many exercises in what Helen Vendler calls ‘minimalist colloquiality’. Poems, unlike manic episodes, were subject to control. Such was Lowell’s strong conviction when, as an undergraduate, he chose to study with Ransom and Tate. His unflagging concern with verse technique is ...”

“... religion and the English hymn; forty years of poems, and hundreds of essays and articles. He has, Helen Vendler wrote, ‘drawn a map of Modernism ... that remains one of the definitive outlines of 20th-century experiment in form and language’, but this map of Modernism was only one of the many maps he ...”

“... neo-Platonist commentary. Shakespeare’s have been picked over at great length by Edmund Malone, Helen Vendler, Stephen Booth and so many others, while the fearsome poet (though no sonneteer) J.H. Prynne has produced a whole volume of commentary on the single Sonnet 94 (‘They that have power to hurt’). Commentary on sonnets is particularly hard to ...”

“... with the initial A: Alfred Conrad (formerly Cohen) in 1953. In 1925, Arnold married the Episcopal Helen Jones from Atlanta and designed a long-sleeved black crêpe dress for her to wear as a uniform. Helen gave up her concert career, although she continued to play the piano every day. Holladay sees an unspoken contest that ...”

“... Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz’, which I used to introduce a review in the LRB of Helen Vendler’s seminal study of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I get up at six the next morning, and rewrite it from memory, trying to draw out the pattern of ‘o’ sounds, the plosives, the guttural ‘k’ sounds and those liquid ‘l’s, which culminate ...”

“... It’s as though he has decided to make himself the subject of a dramatic monologue. As Helen Vendler notes in her fine introduction to this edition, ‘he was – as he must have known – the first American poet to whom the discourse of the basic sciences was entirely natural,’ and that discourse brings with it a vision of the natural as a ...”

“... to the magnitude of the earth’. In her more recent Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry, Helen Vendler has made a comparable point, arguing that geographically and topographically there must be many American poetries: ‘There will be no American landscape that does not speak in words as well as in line and colour.’ I am hoping to suggest that ...”

“... people interrupted in love-making the minute any outside persons come in.’ It sounds ominous – Helen Vendler refers to ‘the dreadful pathology’ of the Moore household – but Linda Leavell speaks of a ‘family idyll’ in her illuminating biography and describes a memoir Marianne began many years afterwards as making ‘a utopia of her ...”

“... present in Irish poems (but not presumably more than French affairs are present in French poems). Helen Vendler, on the other hand, writing about ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, takes a series of steps away from Ireland. ‘Irish events,’ she says, ‘are not Yeats’s principal focus.’ It’s true that ‘the theme of the sequence’ is ...”

“... Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure. In The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Helen Vendler points out that ‘the individual letters of the word “h-e-w-s” (the Quarto spelling) or “h-u-e-s” [are] in as many lines as possible’ in Sonnet 20. She also notes the ‘unique case’ of feminine rhymes throughout the sonnet. Woods ...”

“... he has for some time had a loyal and prestigious following in America. For example, in a review of Helen Vendler’s Harward Book of Contemporary Poetry in the Threepenny Review in 1986, Thom Gunn declared himself utterly unimpressed with what he described as an ‘obviously worthless book’, but went on to compare and favourably contrast Kleinzahler’s ...”

“... The first has a polemical quality, for Keats has long been a favourite poet of the formalists, as Helen Vendler’s accomplished but airless study of the Odes has recently demonstrated. In fact, Keats was his own first ahistorical, anti-political interpreter: both in his letters and in his subtle redeployment of hitherto political themes, the codes of ...”