Vendler's Letter to the World

...And how exciting she makes it sound...

...In Ginsberg, the Jewish immigrant novel meets lyric existential farce," Vendler explains...

...We hoped to discover what makes us tick in order to cope better, to broaden our limited experience by escaping for a while into the minds and hearts of people less callow than ourselves...

...in part political, rejecting Milton's monarchic and hierarchic heaven...

...Such reading becomes a humanist education...

...To illustrate her thesis that poets' themes often emerge from "inescapable" personal circumstances, Vendler focuses on four very apt examples: Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Rita Dove, and Graham...

...Indeed, she especially targets the audiences of the New York Times Book Review and general interest magazines like the New Yorker...

...Borrowing a phrase from Emily Dickinson, Vendler speaks of her criticism as "a letter to the world, more mediated than conversation, more widely aimed than scholarship...

...But while working toward that state, one can enjoy and be helped by her shrewd interpretations of the poets she finds significant...

...John Berryman's struggles with faith and manic depression came together in his Dream Songs to form a "crossing of the Christian...

...Merwin, say, rather than on Seamus Heaney, or Gjertrud Schnackenberg instead of Jorie Graham...

...Many writers merely try to explain themselves to us, or bludgeon us into submission with their ideas or forceful personality...

...Vendler believes that in the end texts must become the property of their readers: You are not obliged to adopt her particular tastes...

...Well, listen to her summing up his book-length 1991 poem Flow Chart as "one huge party line, with everyone in the English-speaking world, from Chaucer to Ann Landers, interrupting each other in incessant fragments...

...Robert Lowell moved from the fierce rhymed metrics of Lord Weary's Castle and The Mill of the Kavenaughs—where, as a Catholic, he condemned a sick society—to the loose, unrhymed rhythms of Life Studies—where he turns himself into "the analysand, rather than...

...INCREASINGLY, Vendler has been studying the implications of style...

...Ultimately, Vendler wants us to read poetry with the same dedication that she does...

...Remember being mystified back in college at the way Gerard Manley Hopkins sometimes started writing a conventional Petrarchan sonnet, then pulled out the form longer and longer as if he were stretching taffy...

...The Breaking of Style (100 pp., $29.95)—first presented at Emory University in 1994 as the Richard Ellmann Memorial Lectures?describes how Gerard Manley Hopkins, Seamus Heaney and Jorie Graham changed the way they wrote during the course of their careers, and explores the significance of their doing so...

...As an adolescent curious to learn more about the world, she felt that "if a poet was a castaway, I too was a castaway...

...if a poet regretted Fern Hill, I too had a house I regretted and had lost...

...Seamus Heaney—a Catholic born in Northern Ireland?found himself looking to the 'thin' music of poetry written in the Irish language for a positive alternative body to the broad (and colonizing) placidities of the English pentameter...

...with the Freudian model" so that "two great schemes of Western thought, the religious and psychoanalytic, contend for Berryman's soul in a hybrid psychomachia...

...Vendler demonstrates that such esthetic choices are actually related to a philosophic shift that occurs as poets take stock, reassess where their truth lies, then work to recast their art into its image...

...Her attempts to coax the timid to screw up their courage in effect say, "Come on in—the water's fine...

...Probably all of us who became hooked on verse at an early age had similar feelings...

...The invisibility of poetry in America to all but the converted" bothers her profoundly, so she works to awaken people to the pleasures they're missing...

...the denunciatory prophet...

...Who else would have thought to compare experiencing John Ashbery's writing to reading "on the qui vive, riding the crests of ever-new imagery, while, on some subliminal level, doing the decoding and relishing the sport...

...Graham grew up trilingual, learning three names for every object, and her intricate meditations on the nature of language strike Vendler as the epitome of the postmodern predicament...

...in part linguistic, rejecting Milton's Latinity...

...Over the years, she has used her books and essays, her Harvard classroom, the lecture podium, even television, to proselytize for the contemporary American lyric...

...Eliot Memorial Lectures at the University of Kent in England were the occasion for Vendler's initial airing of The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition (139 pp., $29.95...

...Hers is a graceful art of a high order...

...The 1993 T.S...

...Both The Breaking of Style and The Given and the Made examine the decision of some writers to repudiate their earlier work as they struggle to begin afresh in a new mode, and thereby express something that could not have been said in the old one...

...Unfortunately, it is easy to drift away in maturity, when one is caught up in simply getting through the day...

...Were you shocked that Allen Ginsberg's Kaddish linked the prayer glorifying God said by Jewish mourners with a horrific account of his mother's descent into madness and the comically awful psychiatric "treatment" she received, not to mention the welter of conflicted feelings all this aroused in his family...

...Lowell, a scion of two families that were major players in the settling of New England, was obsessed with history and wondered whether the private problems of his ancestors might have contributed to the social nightmares of public life...

...Are you dismayed by John Ash-bery's elusive ramblings...

...I learned about future possibilities within my inner life from the poetry I read with such eagerness...

...And she is eager to introduce them to the mysteries of its condensed diction and metaphorical language, to show them that good verse conveys an essential aspect of human existence not captured by any other genre...

...Helen Vendler has set out to change this...

...Because a lyric lacks most of the social trappings of prose writing, she says, it sounds like "the voice of the soul itself" and allows us fuller identification with the speaker...

...Different associations of interests determine, to a certain extent, the poems one chooses to zero in on...

...Recent U.S...

...Vendler tries to reassure us that something vital, directed at each of us individually, lies waiting to be discovered in a good poem...

...Three new books, all published by Harvard University Press, display a wide range of Vendler's most persuasive work...

...One might prefer to concentrate on W.S...

...In The Given and the Made she declares that "the lyric is a script written for performance by the reader—who, as soon as he enters the lyric, is no longer a reader but rather an utterer, saying the words of the poem in propria persona, internally and with proprietary feeling...

...if Auden wrote about the shield of Achilles, Homer was mine as much as his...

...In her Introduction to Soul Says, the critic offers a thumbnail sketch of her own development that tells us a lot about her approach to poetry...

...in part cultural, rejecting Milton 's endorsement of Hebrew mythology over Greek mythology...

...Perhaps my high school training in the antiphonal psalms lay behind my willing self-investiture in any poetic T; 'Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord, Lord, hear my voice.' We in the choir have to take such words as our own, as generations of Jews and Christians and atheists have done...

...Hopkins abandoned the regular metrical line of his juvenilia to construct an intricate "sprung rhythm" which "corresponded to his most fundamental intuition...

...that the beautiful was dangerous, irregular, and binary...

...She argues, for instance, that Keats' "declaration against [Milton's influence on the first version of The Fall of Hyperion] was in part religious, rejecting Milton's god...

...And if it was not literally true when I said, 'They have pierced my hands and feet...

...Vendler agrees that "It makes one think of a science-fiction movie in which a creature is fed some nutriment which makes it elongate its original limbs and sprout extra ones to boot"—but she goes on to uncover the theological and psychological principles that inspired the Jesuit poet to such extravagance...

...What is impressive and convincing about Helen Vendler is her affirmation of the value of close, passionate reading that allows us to encounter another sensibility and absorb part of it into ourselves...

...These discuss a number of the critic's favorite writers, and take several to task for (in her judgment) betraying their calling by slipping into ideological shrillness...

...they have numbered all my bones,' I knew it was metaphorically true of all suffering, my own included...

...Soul Says: On Recent Poetry (266 pp., $24.95) collects reviews from 1987 to 1994...

...Poet Laureate Dove draws on her African American heritage to consider both the social and symbolic issues of color...

...Implicit in her investigations is the question of why a poet chooses to write in one form instead of another, and what conflicts are conveyed by the choice...

...In their search for an amusing attack on the latest fat biography or an intriguing synopsis of a new novel, they understandably skip over reviews peppered with prosody analysis and salted with incomprehensible snippets of verse...

...in part gender-directed, rejecting Milton's principle of male sovereignty...

...The tortuously difficult work of Jorie Graham becomes limpid, too, when Vendler thoughtfully explicates the tangle of philosophical strands underpinning its tight tapestry of images and wordplay...

...Vendler's generosity permits her to understand others as they deserve to be understood...

...She recognizes that although their readers are quite literate, they often need an illuminating guide when tracking through the 20th-century poetic landscape...

...In addition, much education seems aimed at persuading neophytes that the best literature is arcane and can only be understood if one possesses the daunting tools of the specialist...