The Girl in the Library

...And she has preserved a lover's attentiveness to every nuance of tone, as well as the desire to describe the beloved to anyone who will listen...

...Spring's infuriations, the poem tells us, are never over...

...In lapsing so often into cliche . . . Rich has failed her own feelings...

...She never uses criticism to pontificate from an ideological perch...

...In agreeing to collect these pieces I remember my younger self in the library...

...She sorrows over Adri-enne Rich's fall from a daring, experimental poet to a polemicist for "the female principle," not because Vendler disapproves of feminism, but because "To find language better than that of greeting-card verse to express the sentiments of love is the poet's task: the rest of us are not equal to it...

...A whole third of the book is taken up with discussion of their work...

...she simply questions whether critics have emphasized it to the detriment of his deeper emotional qualities...

...Vendler's own view is borne out in her beautiful summary of a late poem, "The Dove in Spring," whose theme she identifies as "sexual feeling in old age": "The dove's small howling takes place at night...

...At every turn, his poetic progress dismayed admirers of its previous phases...

...Stevens is a difficult poet to humanize...

...The very openness and sympathy of Vendler's readings reveal qualities in Lowell's work overlooked by those of us who are more inclined to judge and dismiss...

...Still, it is hard to argue about emotion with someone who describes herself as "captive enough to listen like a three-years' child to anything new and personal being done with words...

...S.] Eliot lecture," Vendler relates, as if to prove that listening so carefully requires a physical commitment as well as an intellectual one...

...It prevents sleep, without presaging a new day...

...How is the critic to handle these matters...

...And so he is," she concurs...

...The clue to Vendler's conception of the poet lies in the title she has chosen for this book...

...We may miss a wilder fancy, or a more human love, or a softer beauty—Audubon was no Keats—but the uncivilized American forest, with its wastes punctuated by savages and criminals, bred a different sort of Romantic . . . incorporating the gory and the ethereal at once...

...Lowell constantly threw his readers off balance by his breaking of old forms, by his choice of subjects, and by his violation of decorum in representing his marital difficulties and family emotions in his poetry...

...The words are from Wallace Stevens' "Academic Discourse at Havana...

...Not that she denies the esthete in Stevens...

...She therefore directs her observations straight at the heart of the matter, so that her readers may recognize at once what she finds so marvelous in a poem...

...That I'm heartbreaking,' he said, meaning it...

...This honesty, Vendler is convinced, shaped him into a great poet, superior to those lacking his vision and his inability to compromise...

...I did not care, or even notice, who had written those books, but I was glad they existed...

...Stevens assures us, in praising the poet, that sound, itself, is a natural ingredient of our world: As part of nature he is part of us...

...The tension in Stevens' work reflects the paradox of his life...

...Nevertheless, at times her closeness to the subject imperils her judgment...

...S.] Merwin has been maintaining his starved and mute stance so long that one has a relentless social worker's urge to ask him to eat something, anything, to cure his anemia...

...When I was seventeen, I caught pneumonia—and thought it no bad bargain—sitting on the floor of Harvard's unheat-ed Memorial Hall, hearing [T...

...These partially hidden feelings attract her closest attention...

...Vendler defends her position by claiming that Wordsworth would have recognized "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears" between the lines of Day by Day, but the examples she quotes, while poignant, do not seem to me to fully make her point...

...there is still no "authorized" evaluation of his work to concur with, much less dispute...

...She listens with infinite sympathy to the poet who uses fresh words to tell that story, be it the voice of Elizabeth Bishop or Frank O'Hara, James Merrill or Allen Ginsberg...

...She abominates "falseness to the wellsprings of life from which metaphors are drawn...

...But love makes her delicate, and she does not wish to be a bore...

...Of Randall Jar-rell's criticism, she observes admiringly, "He thought naturally in metaphor (a source of charm and jokes as well as a source of truth) . . . and he saw books constantly as stories about human beings...

...Vendler's treatment in Part of Nature avoids both the Scylla of prurience and the Charybdis of prudery...

...This being the case, it is hardly surprising that her favorite subjects are Wallace Stevens and Robert Lowell—certainly the most distinctive voices of our time...

...Quite apart from the dubious value of accepting an author's estimate of his own work, I am far from sure that one can "will" to be heartbreaking, or see oneself as such without courting self-pity...

...Faced with the question, "Is the function of the poet here mere sound...

...T JL, he critic saves her harshness for the poetry of stale phrases, trite conceptions, reductive ideas, and attitudinizing...

...Vendler traces his various attempts to deal with this dichotomy...

...That is also true, I think, of Vendler...

...Vendler takes a calculated risk in discussing Lowell as intimately as she does after his death...

...Now, despite my sharing Vendler's admiration for Lowell as our "greatest contemporary poet," I am uneasy about this passage...

...My own preference," Vendler explains, "is to focus on poets one by one, to find in each the idiosyncratic voice wonderfully different from any other...

...She records a rather embarrassing exchange with the poet during a stroll through Harvard Yard...

...In Part ofNature, Part of Us (Harvard, 372 pp., $15.00), she has selected 35 of her recent essays and reviews, offering them to us with a characteristically modest justification: "When I was in school, I read besides [verse] anthologies, books about poets to find new poets and new poems, and to reassure myself that there were people in the world who, to paraphrase Auden, 'exchanged messages' about poetry...

...With age he became sadder but wiser, and eventually he abandoned the brave stance...

...In fact," she concludes, "reading the complete Lowell is rather like seeing Dostoev-sky grow up to be Chekhov...

...In Vendler's happy phrase, "He is so chaste in self-revelation that his emotions are easily passed over...

...Commenting on the manner in which various reviewers have characterized him, Lowell demands, " 'Why don't they ever say what I'd like them to say?'" Vendler inquires what that might be...

...Effort, undone by fate and successful only in fantasy, is finally the quintessential definition of life as of art," says Vendler, finding Stevens' late admission of human frailty more convincing than all his youthful "rapturous praise of the inhuman...

...Ironists who praised Lord Weary's Castle despised Life Studies, whose advocates were displeased in turn by the formality of Notebook...

...Some have reduced the familial drama to soap opera...

...Poetry, clearly, is Vendler's passion...

...They take, in old age, forms that may seem degenerate—a dove displaced from a bough to a prison, a dove that does not coo but howls, a dove that cannot any longer see the undulating silver fans of any imaginable mate—but, if truth is to be told, even degenerate forms must be allowed their pathos of expression...

...To our American taste, Audubon, self-taught, pragmatic, eccentric, solitary, attentive, and proud, seems, for better or worse, our sort...

...Though Vendler relishes any aspect of humanity faithfully expressed, she is impatient with sensitive plants striking a sickly pose of being too pure for this world: "I do not know for sure whether one has the right to reproach a poet for his subject, but [W...

...Turning from one Calvinist to another, Vendler is particularly concerned with "the mercurial shape of Lowell's career...

...The young Stevens was a Platon-ist who wrote as if the inner, spiritual world of ideal forms could triumph over the outer, material one...

...somber, "diminished" imagery pushed out the tropical foliage of his early poetry...

...Although Stevens was never willing to abandon his dream of ideals—love, religion, art—in the end he became persuaded that mundane reality could never accommodate it...

...She cuts through the obfuscating layers of theory to ask, "What else is there to know except what happens to people...

...others have refused to mention the personal content...

...it is for her counterparts today that this volume is intended...

...Helen Vendler is still that girl in the library, hunting eagerly for fresh poems, conveying the excitement she finds in their rarities to other students and lovers of poetry...

...His rarities are ours: may they be fit, And reconcile us to ourselves in those True reconcilings, dark, pacific words...

...Vendler is less devoted to any one style than to the poet's constant pursuit of new forms of expression...

...This vision of poetry mediating between our warring selves permeates everything Vendler writes...

...Consider this powerful description of a poem by Robert Penn Warren: "Audubon's art is muscular and avid: his birds and his rats alike inhabit a world of beak and claw and fang, or ripped-open bellies and planted talons...

...A Hartford Insurance lawyer who was to all outward appearances a faithful servant of the Calvinist work ethic, Stevens wrote poems in his spare time that celebrated the exotic and exalted his Muse as "the interior Paramour...