Shakespeare Etherized Upon a Table

...Complete with a compact disk of the sonnets read by Vendler, it is a work, she tells us, "that those interested in the sonnets, or students of the lyric, or poets hungry for resource may wish to browse in...

...It is also astoundinghy bad...

...Spawned by what T. S. Eliot derided as the "lemon-squeezer school," it is the source of the anagrams, diagrams, and typographical tricks Vendler inflicts upon her readers...

...A University Professor at Harvard, she has written ten books on poetry...

...Nor does she consider that the speaker himselfmight be "the opponent"—the one who has to answer his own worries about commitment and protests too much: "Let me not . . ." Samuel Johnson once observed that Shakespeare's sonnets can become "entangled with an unwieldy sentiment, which he cannot well express, and will not reject...

...It is the star to every wand'ring bark, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken...

...Celebrating these familiar lines, Vendler declares, "the performative speech-act of Platonic fidelity in quasimarital mental love cannot be qualified...

...The best way to explain Vendler's attempt to deal with all this may be to point out that what's true in her own university press's behemoth isn't new, and what's new isn't true...

...Particular words may link the metaphors in a sonnet, but they cannot hold it together as a poem—especially since Shakespeare typically terminates his metaphors, his rhymes, and his sentences all together at the end of each quatrain...

...The marriage service in the Book of Common Prayer asks the congregation to "allege and declare any impediment why they may not be coupled together in matrimony...

...To the excesses of this school, the deathblow was delivered in 1973 by the literary critic Stanley Fish (infamous for his own excesses) when he wrote that it results in interpretations "simultaneously fixed and arbitrary, fixed because [patterns] are specified apart from contexts, and arbitrary because . . . it is in contexts that meaning occurs...

...But in Vendler's unacknowledged version of "Stylistics," what has actually happened is that form has swallowed up function, and the only drama left is the drama of syntax...

...In the end, the "close reading" that Helen Vendler undertakes in The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets proves so microscopic that her Shakespeare cannot be distinguished from her Wallace Stevens or her George Herbert or her Jorie Graham or her anyone else...

...Ordinary readers "prefer to think of the sonnets as discursive propositional statements rather than as situationally motivated speech-acts, [and thus] remain condemned to a static view of any given sonnet...

...But Vendler transforms this commonplace into cabalism by attaching to each poem a list of "Key Words" linking the three quatrains and the couplet...

...Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come...

...But the version used by Shakespeare in the late 1500s has an altogether looser structure: three four-line quatrains and a final tacked-on pair of lines forming the couplet, the whole rhyming abab, cdcd, efef, gg (which lets in seven rhymes rather than five, a boon in rhyme-poor English...

...The simpler truth is that the form Shakespeare employs necessarily delivers his sonnets piecemeal, however magnificent and psychologically penetrating the fragments may be...

...Vendler seems not to imagine anyone else can see that the quarrel between speaker and opponent is "extended...

...Vendler writes that she does "not regard as literary criticism any set of remarks about a poem which would be equally true of its paraphrasable propositional content...

...And as a result she has been reluctant to address psychological drama or historical context—or race, class, and gender...

...Vendler calls Sonnet 130 "a defense of the woman as she is," but it is a bagatelle probably better read as a caution to fellow poets more dazzled by poetic tropes than by real women...

...So, for example, in the much-loved Sonnet 116, Let me not to the marriage of true minds, the "Key Word" is love and the "Couplet Tie" is made through love, no, never, ever...

...is perhaps the only thought possible after digesting that "But of course...

...Why doesn't Vendler just devote the space to a real Renaissance love poem...

...Up until now, especially in her reviews, Vendler's prose has been workmanlike...

...She's capable of rightly dismissing as "fundamentally uninteresting aural doodles" the repetition of tew sounds in the first quatrain of Sonnet 38, How can my Muse want subject to invent...

...The sonnet is not a poetic form Margaret Boerner teaches English and core humanities at Villanova University...

...As a pretext for discussing Sonnet 130, My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun, Vendler embarrassingly sweats out her own fictitious poem (a mock-up, as it were, of the sonnet to which Shakespeare's is supposedly a "reply-poem...

...The vertically conceived star cannot be reinscribed in the matrix of the metonymic hours and weeks of linear sublunary mortality...

...Nor does she refrain from fiddling interminably with a crypt-analysis of the letters h-e-w in each line of that beautiful trifle, Sonnet 20, A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted—about which even she is forced to conclude lamely, "If this anagrammatic play is in fact intended, the sonnet becomes even more fantastic than its theme suggests...

...After all her insistence upon "Couplet Tie," Vendler fails to show that the poem's talk of things past does indeed lead to a real consolation in the concluding couplet—and not just the whistling in the dark that it seems: But if the while I think on thee (dear friend) / All losses are restored, and sorrows end...

...Vendler discharges this battery of simultaneously obscurantist and self-congratulatory jargon against, for example, Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments...

...Her potentially interesting discussion of "receding through panels of time" in Sonnet 30, When to the sessions of sweet silent thought, peters out into limp praise of Shakespeare's "enormous power to order intellectually recalcitrant material into lyrically convincing schemes...

...Its Italian inventors in the thirteenth century originally arranged its fourteen lines in two sections, each held together by rhyme: an octave (eight lines typically rhymed abbaabba) and a sestet (six lines typically rhymed cdecde...

...We should know such an interpretation is "untrue, and not simply incomplete," because the poem is really a "rebuttal" to "an anterior utterance by another which the sonnet is concerned to repudiate...

...It's all true—except when it isn't...

...The early and pre-publication reviews of the book have been almost fawningly respectful...

...But something seems to have come disconnected when she turned to Shakespeare, for she lards her work with such monstrosities as contraptionness, directed-vector actions, shared speech thoughts, discourse category, synonymous performative act, and cyclicity...

...Alas, poor star...

...The poem entertains, in the couplet, the deconstructive notion of [the couplet's] own self-dissolution...

...But the tone permeates The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets and—despite a profusion of pro forma nods to those less well versed than Vendler—slanders her intended audience...

...Some readers will perhaps be unable to distinguish the necessitarian from the necessaritarian, but all will be glad to learn that the osmosis of Shakespeare's compartments of discourse is directed by an invisible discourse-master...

...Who could quarrel with this...

...But Helen Vendler is intent on turning Shakespeare's careless genius into a fastidious (and esoteric) genius...

...It's particularly sad to watch such vivisection performed on Shakespeare, and "browsing" through the resulting gore for occasional insights is something no one should have to do...

...Of the sonnet's star to every wand'ring bark, she claims, "But of course the hyperbolic, transcendent, and paradigmatic star is the casualty of the refutational reinscription contained in the third quatrain...

...And that is proof of just how powerful the sixty-four year-old critic has become, for The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets succeeds mostly in making the obvious arcane, elevating the banal, printing up lecture notes, and rabbitting on for nearly seven hundred pages...

...Vendler's own byzantine blue-prints—her charts of "interconcate-nation"—exemplify a clapped-out, 1970s brand of literary criticism known as "Stylistics...

...And she makes it a marvelous example of the question-begging triumph of critical method over poetic fact when she appends one of her occasional lists of "Defective Key Words," the missing words that would have knit together a sonnet if only they had happened to be there...

...For this, her earlier work has received considerable praise from both liberal critics (who see her defending a higher ground of art for art's sake) and conservative critics (who see her dismissing the hip cant of the radical academy and returning to the close-reading "New Criticism" of the 1950s...

...love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove...

...There is an episode in David Lodge's hilarious 1984 academic novel Small World where those arriving at a conference on literary theory receive "a handout which looked like the blueprint for an electric power station, all arrows, lines, and boxes...

...Vendler even claims that "No reader, to my knowledge, has seen [Sonnet 116] as a coherent refutation of the extended implied argument of an opponent, and this represents an astonishing history of critical oversight, a paradigmatic case of how reading a poem as though it were an essay, governed by an initial topic sentence, can miss its entire aesthetic dynamic...

...The line beginning "O no" obviously means that the speaker is countering an opponent's list of impediments to love...

...Philip Sidney, John Donne, George Herbert, John Milton, and William Wordsworth all wrote better formed, less slapdash sonnets...

...In defense of ordinary readers, it ought to be pointed out that nearly everyone who's looked at Sonnet 116 has noticed the "implied argument of an opponent" in the poem's use of weddings...

...she sits on the Pulitzer Prize board and the grant panel of the Guggenheim Foundation, nominates for the MacArthur "genius" awards, and reviews incessantly for the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and the New Yorker...

...0 no, it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken...

...Similarly, she gives for each poem what she calls the "Couplet Tie"— the words in the body of the sonnet that are repeated in the concluding couplet...

...Certainly anyone with less imposing credentials can hardly have hoped to see so elephantine a "little handbook" into print...

...Widely applauded as America's greatest "close reader," she has now produced The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, a commentary on each of the 154 sonnets in the 1609 edition of Shakespeare...

...When she says, for instance, that "successive quatrains 'correct' each other" but "are not repudiated as wwtrue," the first thing that comes to mind is that no serious reader has ever thought otherwise...

...if it is qualified, it does not represent love...

...Her neck more white, than aged Swans that moan—generates what her own creation does not: an odd contentment in the reader, worth Shakespeare's interest...

...Shakespeare Etherized Upon a Table Helen Vendler Vivisects the Bard By Margaret Boerner Helen Vendler is "a woman of power in the ivory tower," according to the New York Times—a "kingmaker" and "arguably the most powerful poetry critic in America...

...She does condescend to footnote a specimen but fails to notice how the old five-finger exercise she cites—Her lips more red than any Coral stone...

...The patronizing tone of this is heard more often from pompous graduate students (for whom any "critical oversight" is "astonishing") than from major literary critics...

...native to English...

...Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom...

...If this be error and upon me proved, 1 never writ, nor no man ever loved...

...One consequence is her compulsive toying with trivia...

...But that does not stop her from dwelling, for example, on "an arbitrary pattern in vowel/diphthong plus n" in Sonnet 53, What is your substance, whereof are you made...

...This tight form would later find a home in English (with John Milton's beautiful seventeenth-century sonnets, for instance...

...Insofar as one can sort out Vendler's reading of Sonnet 116, it indicts readers for finding in the poem "a definition of true love...

...In the same way that frogs dissected down to their individual cells stop being frogs, she slices poetry down to the meaningless...