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“... proved ‘congenial to the United States poetry establishment – particularly to its queen, Helen Vendler’. Noting with far too much cynicism the usefulness of her reviews in advancing the poet’s reputation, Fennell accuses Heaney of opting for Vendler’s belief that good poetry is ‘a private musing ...”

“... illustrated an elegant volume of Yeats’s poems from Arion Press in San Francisco, introduced by Helen Vendler. Vendler had already done an edition of Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ for Arion, printed on roundel pages – wheels of paper 18” in diameter – with work by several artists, including ...”

“... sorbet and ampoules of reduced prawn head bouillon (two Adrià signature dishes). On the other, Helen Vendler. Outcome not obvious. What we outsiders didn’t know is that all undergraduates at Harvard are required to take at least one class in science. As a result, the university offers some courses designed to be appealing to the kinds of student who ...”

“... obsesses minor poets,’ Walcott has written, and not just minor poets, but major critics too – Helen Vendler has accused Walcott of ventriloquism.) His genius may be intermittent and may have taken a long time to emerge – his best work doesn’t begin until 1973, with the publication of his fourth collection, the autobiographical Another Life ...”

“... it’s ‘best not to listen/for any decibels of little mandibles’. The poems include what Helen Vendler, in Last Looks, Last Books (2010), names ‘the pressure of death within life’, ‘the weary desire for freedom from the body’, but they also raise new hopes, novelties, icons of life that goes on. In lesser hands these attempts would lead ...”

“... determine its size and shape, its character and its content, and they deserve our attention. When Helen Vendler begins her recent book on Seamus Heaney, for example, ‘I am grateful to Seamus Heaney, first and foremost, for all the invaluable poetry and prose that he has added to the store of literature in English,’ you can be fairly sure that she’s ...”

“... imagined as O’Hara’s piano teacher. In Bloom’s Yale collection of essays on Ashbery, Helen Vendler, with typical forthrightness, considers the question of the poet’s ‘subject-matter’: ‘it is popularly believed, with some reason, that’ his style is ‘impenetrable, that it is impossible to say what an Ashbery poem is ...”

“... numerous double meanings . . . are too obvious to need an explanation.’ (Reason not the need: Helen Vendler, in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, glosses ‘conscience’ as ‘knowledge of cunt’.) Ingram and Redpath approach the young man in an especially gingerly fashion, suggesting that ‘the relationship was one of profound and at times ...”

“... 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 jamming them together and running them into one another.’ Yet here is her Faber Book, a self-confessed anthology which, attempting to present 35 poets ‘whole’, aspires to be a collection of Collecteds ...”

“... with The Infinitesimals, in between.) Kasischke’s poems let some of us say about them what Helen Vendler once said about the early books of Adrienne Rich: ‘someone my age was writing down my life.’ Kasischke has chronicled her generation, the generation where wild kids learned to smoke, and then learned, as adults, never to smoke: the memory ...”

“... least. Critics unimpressed by the psychodrama of Eliot’s Christianity, such as Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, much prefer Yeats and Stevens. And as a glance at any anthology of 20th-century British poetry will show, the prewar voices most audible today belong to Auden and MacNeice. From the maudlin Tom and Viv to Peter Ackroyd’s unauthorised Life ...”

“... seems to try to render in exact terms. Most contemporary American poetry wants only to offer what Helen Vendler has called ‘an interior state clarified in language’. ‘Clarified’ is an ambiguous word here, meaning the poetry’s effort to achieve the effect of being clear on the page. In Ashbery’s case the wordage trembles with a perpetual ...”

“... alone are certain good.’ And then I began to wonder where I could find such a book. Helen Vendler’s long study of the art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, is that purely aesthetic study of poetic language in action, and it begins appropriately with this statement: ‘I assume that a poem is not an essay, and that its paraphrasable ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”