Helen Vendler: A Personal Note
The American poetry critic Helen Vendler died of cancer at the age of ninety on April 23, 2024. In this personal reflection, poet and critic John Greening considers the significance of her oeuvre and its deep influence on him as a reader and thinker.
It was Jean Sibelius who remarked that no one ever raised a statue to a critic and it’s true that the British press have by and large declined to acknowledge the passing of the American poetry critic Helen Vendler (1933-2024). But her death from cancer last month at the age of ninety was marked in the USA by some extravagant headlines (a ‘Colossus’ of poetry—The New York Times, ‘a towering presence’—The Boston Globe). A ‘poetry critic’ is indeed what she should be called, since she claimed to have only once reviewed a novel and felt so guilty at ‘falsifying’ her competence that she never wrote about fiction again. Instead, Vendler would become for some decades the arbiter of taste in contemporary American poetry: the person you both wanted and dreaded to be reviewed by. Her position as poetry critic at the New Yorker from 1978-1996 (she was also reviewer for several other major journals and consultant poetry editor to the New York Times) gave her immense power and the consequent resentment was foreseeable in an age when—to quote Lewis Carroll’s Dodo—‘Everybody has won and all must have prizes’.
If anyone should have been resentful, however, it was Vendler herself, as she explains in the very personal introduction to her 2015 book The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar (itself described in a review by Daniel Swift in the Spectator as ‘full of condescending waffle’). Her first professional experience as a graduate student at Harvard in the mid-1950s, for example, was to be told by the Chair of the English Department ‘You know we don’t want you here, Miss Hennessy: we don’t want any women here.’ When she fell pregnant, she was forbidden to teach, and her reviewing work was strongly disapproved of. At thirty-four, she found herself divorced and with a son to raise, living on child support, and teaching four courses each term (including a night-school) and two each summer. And so it progressed. It’s not surprising that she learned to be sure of herself—nor that she was an early fan of Adrienne Rich’s feminist writings. When Harvard did eventually offer her a teaching post, the first ever for a woman in the English department, she chose to decline and did not work there until the 1980s.
If it was hard for a woman to get very far in the academic or literary world in the mid-20th century, once Vendler broke through she found herself in positions of literary influence undreamt of by today’s (increasingly female) reviewers, editors, and anthologists. We may be wary of, say, William Logan reviewing our latest slim volume, but it’s hard to imagine him or anyone else shaping the taste of the era. For one thing, in 2024 everybody thinks they are a critic however little poetry they have actually read. Gone are the days when a well-placed article by Randall Jarrell could confirm the reputation of Robert Frost, or when Al Alvarez could publicly anoint Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in the Sunday papers (while at the same time dismissing Peter Redgrove). Alvarez or Ian Hamilton are probably the closest parallels in the UK to Helen Vendler: neither was afraid to flaunt their personal taste, to exclude writers they weren’t convinced by, and thus they made enemies enough between them. Nor, of course, did these chaps feel any particular obligation to acknowledge poets from minorities, from unexpected backgrounds, neglected ethnicities. No one would have raised many objections if there were no women, no Black or Asian writers, none from the working class or Cornwall. Helen Vendler was much more attuned to such things from the outset but, nevertheless, the thirty-five poets in her Harvard anthology from the 1980s were there, one felt, solely because she believed in them as poets. Their identities, their back-stories didn’t come into it. Subsequently, we have come to expect that poetry anthologies will cast their net wide, that there will be fewer poems from each writer because all must be represented (and perhaps also, banal truth though it be, because they cost so much to include).
It’s this very issue that led to one of the most notorious literary spats of recent years—one which played out over the internet and even made the pages of the Guardian (who have, incidentally, declined to publish Vendler’s obituary) but which had an almost-happy ending in the saddest of circumstances. Reviewing Rita Dove’s Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry in the November 24th, 2011, New York Review (‘Are These the Poems to Remember?’), Vendler had found that the 175-odd poets lacked any clear ‘principle of selection’, questioning the editor’s decision to represent such a wide range of sometimes marginal poets. As an anthology editor myself, I can sympathise with Dove’s defence that some better-known names (e.g. Plath and Ginsberg) were excluded because of permission fees, but Vendler does seem to have a strong case—although inevitably the fact that many of the new poets were black caused a rumpus. Rita Dove responded in the NYR in a long, robust six-point defence which begins: ‘Helen Vendler seems to have allowed outrage to get the better of her, leading to a number of illogical assertions and haphazard conclusions’ and concludes ‘how sad to witness a formidable intelligence ravished in such a clumsy performance’. Vendler simply responded by saying, in effect, that she had written what she had written and stood by it.
Following Helen Vendler’s death last month, Rita Dove announced that she had received a letter from her one-time friend apologising from her deathbed for the pain caused by her review but assuring her she had never lost faith in Dove as a poet and saluting her unforgettable poems. Rita Dove replied, saying (yet suspecting Helen Vendler would never read her words) that she had always mourned the loss of their friendship. In fact, her son was able to read the message to her an hour before she died and reported that she was glad to have heard it. Vendler’s act of reaching out is at once surprising and unsurprising. She was brought up a Boston Catholic and, although she lost her faith, that experience evidently left its mark and certainly influenced her tastes. She liked big serious poets who tackle the big spiritual issues.
Helen Vendler’s own approach to anthology-making was highly selective and so would lead, ironically enough, to multiple exclusions of her own. She knew her tastes and she stuck by them as firmly as she did to the opinions she expressed in her review of Dove’s book. Perhaps her training in Maths and the sciences helped give her a more pragmatic, hard-headed approach. It was I.A. Richards (author of the celebrated Practical Criticism, published four years before Vendler’s birth) who laid down that pattern of close reading which underpinned all her editorial and critical work during the years she spent teaching at Harvard. Her 1985 Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry (which appeared later in the UK as the Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry) shows her at her most personal and discriminating, two qualities I look for in the editor of an anthology. It might not be the best way to introduce yourself to the American canon, but for this British writer it was an unforgettable resource in deepening knowledge of some very substantial poets I did not know.
I first opened the very elegant, black-jacketed Harvard hardback in 1990, between lessons in the library of Bridgewater West High School, New Jersey, where I was teaching on a Fulbright Exchange. This was, of course, the same organisation that had come to Vendler’s rescue and sent her to Bordeaux for a year of ‘mandarin leisure’ in the 1960s when she was a struggling single mother. I was in my late thirties, already a devout follower of some of the better-known poets she featured—Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop. One of the mighty handful, Howard Nemerov, I had discovered as a teenager when I chose a poem of his to talk about at school. Wilbur and Jarrell I had browsed. I thought I knew Gary Snyder, but Vendler helped me to realise I really didn’t. I had read a little early Merrill from the Phoenix Living Poets editions I’d found (of all places) in a secondhand bookshop in Frome, but it was Vendler who would point me to his revelatory Sandover trilogy. I knew enough of Anne Sexton not to be impressed but was willing to give her another chance. Who were these others, though? A.R. Ammons, Rita Dove, Louise Glück, Dave Smith, Robert Pinsky, Robert Hayden, two Wrights, James and Charles . . . Some of them (perhaps on the back of their appearance in the Faber anthology) would soon find British publishers—Bloodaxe snapped up Dave Smith and brought out the Complete James Wright. Glück had been with Anvil but went to Carcanet. Even today I am discovering new depths in these writers; others I still struggle with, persevering because they were on what I like to think of as Vendler’s List. Mark Strand, Frank Bidart, Michael Harper, and a few others I have yet to tackle properly.
I soon found myself seeking out Helen Vendler’s collections of reviews and essays on contemporary poetry. I began, during that year in New Jersey, with The Music of What Happens (Harvard, 1988), essays on criticism and critics (Hartmann, Bloom, Barthes), on the nature of poetry, and on individual poets including a good few from this side of the Atlantic (Wordsworth, Keats, Heaney, Spender, Davie, Hughes, Miłosz) and then I tracked down Part of Nature, Part of Us (Harvard, 1980). These books were vital in helping me understand which areas of American literature I should focus on, and I was determined to come to terms with the poets she championed. In 1995, Vendler’s T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures were published by Faber in the UK as The Given and the Made: Recent American Poets and received considerable attention, not all of it favourable. The lectures focused on Lowell (they were delivered at the University of Kent, a county in which he had lived), Berryman, Jorie Graham and, yes, Rita Dove. I remember corresponding with the much-missed poet and doughty critic William Scammell about this book; he had severe reservations about Vendler’s taste, her distaste for the accessible and what he saw as her limiting, somewhat dogmatic approach. He also quoted James Fenton, ‘The Manila Manifesto’, one of whose sections reads: ‘In Madame Vendler’s Chamber of Horrors I saw seven / American poets, strung up by their swaddling bands / and crying: More Pap! More Pap!’
Also in 1995 (something of an annus mirabilis for Vendler), came The Breaking of Style, another series of lectures, the Richard Ellmann (on Hopkins, Graham, and Heaney) as well as Soul Says, a further very substantial gathering of reviews of—her critics would say—the usual suspects: Ginsberg, Glück, Ammons, Merrill, Dave Smith, Goldbarth, Clampitt, Simic, Dove, Graham, Heaney. A volume dedicated solely to Heaney came out in 1998 and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a guide to his work—as far as The Spirit Level, at least. In the 2000s, Vendler published some fascinating miniature groups of essays concentrating on certain very specific areas: the way poets have found a voice (Coming of Age as a Poet [2003] on Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath) or the way they have used their heads (Poets Thinking [2004] on Pope, Whitman, Dickinson and Yeats) or their search for expression of intimacy (Invisible Listeners [2005] on Herbert, Whitman and Ashbery) or how they have ended their careers (Last Looks, Last Books [2010] on Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill). In 2007, there was also the rather impenetrable Yeats study: Our Secret Discipline. I have since caught up with various equally forbidding earlier books—on Wallace Stevens especially, and I am sure there are others I have not unearthed. Those above-mentioned collections of essays, lectures, and reviews remain a resource I return to repeatedly, even if Vendler is praised more these days for her best-selling annotated anthologies—of Shakespeare’s sonnets, for instance, and of Emily Dickinson—whom she not-so-very-long-ago, in a Paris Review interview, denied ever having read properly. Both are superb guides to the poets in question.
Although she was inescapably and contentedly associated with certain poets, returning to them like a theme in a Beethoven rondo, Helen Vendler was always prepared to consider new work—as I found to my astonishment in the summer of 2010 (see below). But she was fiercely loyal to those poets she had fallen for early on, preferring to keep looking more deeply into what she already knew rather than risk any superficial and perhaps premature judgment on something unfamiliar. It was her reading of Wallace Stevens when she was twenty-three that underpinned everything (‘it was through him that I understood style as personality, style as the actual material body of inner being’) but her dissertation on W.B. Yeats and an early study of George Herbert were also fundamental. Given these influences, one might expect her thinking to be occasionally hard to follow (the analysis of Stevens’s long poems, for instance in her celebrated study from the 1960s, On Extended Wings, and that late exploration of Yeats and lyric form, The Secret Discipline), but that was never the fault of her writing which was consistently lucid and could be thrillingly enlightening. I must confess that when I was younger, I resisted criticism whenever I could, preferring to trust my own judgment, and even today I prefer to read what poets have to say about poets. But Helen Vendler’s essays made me want to enjoy what she enjoyed—not perhaps (or not yet) Jorie Graham or John Ashbery, although her essays took me as far into those poets as I am ever likely to get, but A.R. Ammons, Louise Glück, James Merrill, Amy Clampitt, who have become lifelong companions. Her practical criticism was intensely practical in that it genuinely did show one a way of reading poets who were otherwise hard to grasp. She did for poetry what Donald Tovey or, dare I suggest, Antony Hopkins (and I don’t mean Hannibal) once did for classical music.
Thirty-five years on from that day in the Bridgewater library, I am still working through the poets she recommended. I only recently began on some individual volumes of the extraordinarily prolific Charles Wright and there is no end in sight (except his Oblivion Banjo). Just before lockdown in my favourite London bookshop, Judd Books, I spotted some Albert Goldbarth (quite unknown in the UK) and have found him just as entertaining as she had suggested. The W.S. Merwin Collected I bought in Seattle, in 2015, impressed me less but I am willing to put my faith in the firm of Vendler and Astley (Bloodaxe published the British edition) and to assume the fault is mine. On the strength of Vendler’s examples, I bought Robert Pinsky’s The Want Bone in New Jersey and later the Carcanet Selected, growing into his work with every passing decade (I’m much looking forward to his new collection later this year). The other day I ordered a selection of James Dickey just in case I was missing something. I really wasn’t, and Dickey is not a poet Vendler returned to much despite including him in her anthology. And then there’s Rita Dove, whose work I probably wouldn’t even have encountered without her encouragement; nowadays I return to it repeatedly.
I’m sure that Helen Vendler’s writing had this effect on other people too. She was someone who could be relied on to help readers understand why Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize or why Lucie Brock-Broido might be worth their time. She didn’t always make the right call. Her prediction in the 1980s that lines from Ammons’s poem ‘Easter Morning’ (‘a new treasure in American poetry’, ‘Ammons’s elegy in a country churchyard’) would be ‘as familiar in a hundred years as Wordsworth’s “There was a time . . . ”’ is looking increasingly implausible. Her enthusiasm did occasionally lead her to make such sweeping statements, but better that than the endless hedging of bets to which most of us incline. She showed an enviable unconcern for the fact that she might be offending someone or endangering her own career— the kind of thing Dana Gioia described in his Can Poetry Matter? whereby poets scratch each other’s backs and include each other in their anthologies which even the contributors don’t read. After all, not being a poet herself (although Vendler did write verse when she was younger) she need not fear being ostracized.
*
It was in July 2010 that a forwarded airmail letter originally posted in Cambridge, Massachusetts arrived on our rather scruffy doormat in Cambridgeshire, England. Helen Vendler’s letter from Harvard began by mentioning a recent TLS review in which I had apparently paid her a compliment that she considered ‘the most moving I have ever received’, although she hadn’t realised she wanted that particular thing said of her work. I had simply remarked that I felt she was able to bring a reader ‘to the mysterious heart of poems’. This comment, she wrote, brought her ‘deep reward’. This was all astonishing enough, but the next few paragraphs made it clear that she had been reading my little book (a student guide, of all things) on the First World War Poets and, also, my Hunts: Poems 1979-2009, a volume not easily obtained in the USA. Nor did she just mention this in passing but gave detailed and complimentary Vendlerian commentaries on several of the poems.
Six years later, having just about recovered from the shock of receiving fan mail from my favourite critic, I was a Writing Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund at Newnham College, Cambridge. Any mail for the teaching staff ended up in pigeonholes whose existence I tended to forget about. One day, I remembered to ask if there happened to be anything for me, and I was presented with another cream-coloured Harvard envelope, with its Boston postmark and departmental return address. Goodness knows how long it had been sitting there in the porter’s lodge (the same, presumably, where Sylvia Plath would have asked for her mail). The earlier letter had been handwritten; this was typed. Professor Vendler apologised for the long delay (citing one of Hopkins’s letters where he says he means to write every day but by the time each day ends he is too tired) and explained how ill she had been, but then came to the reason why she was writing.
The previous year I had bought myself a copy of The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar while visiting a bookshop with my sister-in-law in Seattle, and when I found it to be a rewarding and significant book (the most satisfactory conditions for beginning a review) I asked the TLS if they’d let me cover it. Helen Vendler had evidently seen the piece and approved. She was especially pleased that I said she didn’t do what many critics do and ‘ignore tricky passages’. ‘If one can’t deal with them,’ she wrote, ‘one should at least announce their presence, I think, and confess one’s own helplessness’. She wrote candidly about her friendship with Seamus Heaney and the shock of his death (quoting his 9/11 poem, ‘Anything Can Happen’) and went on to mention once again my interest in the WW1 poets, although she confuses Edmund Blunden—whose memoir, Undertones of War, I had just edited for OUP—with Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. It is a lovely, chatty letter and included an invitation to meet up, but there would alas be no opportunity. She gave me her email address which I contacted but if I ever heard back, I have lost the email. There are so many things I would like to have discussed, including the coincidence of her friendship with my old tutor at Swansea, M. Wynn Thomas. I am left with a few regrets—that the correspondence didn’t continue, that we never actually met, that I didn’t send her a copy of my American Selected last year. But I am also left with her own books, and all those wonderfully clear markers she has set down to guide us through what can sometimes be a rather forbidding forest.
John Greening’s collection of Vendler’s books.
John Greening is a Bridport, Arvon and Cholmondeley winner with over twenty collections, most recently From the East (Renard). The Interpretation of Owls: Selected Poems 1977-2022 (Baylor University, USA, ed. Gardner) came out in 2023.
