A Critical Review of Helen Vendler's Newest Essay Collection

Poetry critic Helen Vendler has been taken down a peg or two with this piece in The Spectator. Daniel Swift looks at Vendler's newest book of collected essays, The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar, writing that "they apparently have not been edited for republication, so the tone varies considerably," and that an understanding he himself had in another book ("that the late religious poetry by the great American poet John Berryman reminds [him] of the 17th-century English poet George Herbert") is, in Vendler's, "quoted and then smacked down."

Apologies for making this personal, but this in miniature is the precise problem that has always bedevilled literary critics: the problem of how to balance feeling and fact, and how to translate subjective response (I love this poem) into informed judgment (this is a great poem).

Later, Swift details his issues with the inconsistency, and Vendler's reliance on literary criticism as a science:

The real question about the scientific evaluation of literature arises not when we discuss famous poetry, but when we turn to popular culture. For everyone agrees that the poets Vendler discusses are great, but nobody agrees about how we might apply those same standards to popular culture. Vendler sidesteps this by pretending that popular culture doesn’t exist. ‘Our students leave high school knowing almost nothing about American art, music, architecture and sculpture, and having only a superficial acquaintance with a few American writers,’ she moans. But this isn’t true. American schoolchildren know popular music, and they also know the TV shows Mad Men, The Wire and Breaking Bad — which are better written than the vast majority of American literature of the last decade. ‘Without the scholar and his libraries there would be no perpetuation and transmission of culture,’ she goes on: but what about theatres, museums, cinemas?

Art, Vendler writes, quoting Wallace Stevens, ‘helps us to live our lives’. Lurking inside this collection is a plea to the world that we should all read more poetry and think seriously about art; and for Vendler, this wish is powerfully personal. The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar opens with a brief memoir of Vendler’s early years as an academic, and particularly the misogynistic slights she received from older male colleagues in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But from this moving opening she falls almost immediately into the common trap of any public defence of the humanities: slightly condescending waffle which ignores the simple fact that high art is difficult...

Read the full review at the Spectator.