But on the stormy trans-Atlantic voyage, Vendler had a reckoning with herself. (Vendler herself has noted the lack of great poetry about motherhood, though Sylvia Plath, she said, “made a beginning.”) Today Vendler seldom reviews poets under 50, since their “frames of reference,” she says, are alien to her. Poetry scholar Helen Vendler takes 150 of Dickinson’s poems and not only explains them, she opens each one up, throws the doors wide open and amazes readers with how much is going on behind Dickinson’s plain style and compact verses.
How nice it would be to have Ms. Vendler take me by the hand through the halls of poetry, pointing out things I hadn’t noticed and explaining what I thought I couldn’t understand.She’s an interesting gal, this Helen Vendler. Nor do I eat bullion cubes.’”I’ve been a spoiler myself, often enough to be called a snob at best and a social moron at worst. “It would put her under enormous pressure.” But in 1975, when Harvey Shapiro, himself a poet, succeeded Leonard as editor of the Book Review, he immediately ended the arrangement. “Maybe in the end her major achievement will be as a teacher, both in terms of her pupils, and the books she’s written about canonical figures, teaching people how to read them,” said the critic and poet Adam Kirsch, who studied with Vendler as an undergraduate in the mid-’90s. He was teaching us Spanish, French, and Italian, which is what he taught in high school. But there’s truth in Fitzgerald’s words that I hope I remember the next time someone pushes a book on me that doesn’t meet my literary standards.Besides, if we culture snobs are too invested in our own critical abilities, we risk coming off as mere poseurs.Watching a advertisement for an upcoming DVD sale, my son said, ““I wouldn’t exactly call it a masterpiece,” I said.I ran through my file of classic movies–Citizen Kane and—and—uh–and–every foreign film I’ve ever seen. “They’re writing about the television cartoons they saw when they were growing up. Helen Vendler knows poetry from the outside in and the inside out; this book will not only clue you in to how poetry works, why people write poetry, what makes a good poem, but will bring together the intrapsychic, social, political, and historical links that make poetry survive after a number of millennia. He was himself bilingual in Spanish. Although she was encouraged to read poetry — her mother, a former schoolteacher, had memorized many poems, and her father taught Romance languages at a high school — her parents forbade her to attend the prestigious Boston Latin School for Girls, and later Radcliffe, because, like many devout Roman Catholics at the time, they accepted the church’s strong disapproval of secular education. She’s a perfect guide. Sunlight plays on ivy-covered brick.
By this time she already wielded considerable power outside the academy. “I think the ‘Aeneid’ should have been burned and Kafka’s works should have been burned, because personal fidelity is more important than art,” she said in her quiet, direct manner. Vendler was born Helen Hennessy in Boston in 1933.