Her core course is called ”Poems, Poets, Poetry.” But it’s not just Harvard students who associate her with these words: for the literary world, A. Kingsley University Professor of English Helen Vendler means poetry. Poets hope she will sit up and take notice of their work; the criticism she has written on both living and dead bards has become a canon of its own.
Vendler published her PhD thesis on the Irish writer William Butler Yeats in 1960, a work that she would turn into her first book three years later. Even as a budding scholar, however, she had to admit to herself that she wasn’t ready to tackle Yeats’ poetry. “I felt I was too young to write about the poems, which were so great,” Vendler says.
But now she’s ready. With four lectures on Yeats at Oxford University this summer and a book on Yeats’ poems in the making, Vendler has decided to return to the subject that launched her career.
In her first book on Yeats, Vendler focused on a prose essay entitled “A Vision,” comparing it to some of his later plays. Her second time around, she will concentrate solely on the poems.
When she first began writing on Yeats forty years ago, Vendler was disturbed by a trend in Yeatsian scholarship that continues to this day. “A lot of the work that had been done at the time on Yeats was biographical and historical, and not enough attention had been paid to the poems,” Vendler recalls. Nowhere in many of the most thorough studies of Yeats’ career, Vendler laments, does it mention the poetic structure of his work. “The poets take a lot of pain in not writing prose, so if you ignore the pains they have taken in not writing prose, it seems to be you’re ignoring the great energy that went into creating something [in verse],” Vendler says. Vendler asserts her significance in the field with intensely close readings that often bring new light and meaning to well-trodden poems. Susan Miller, who has worked with Vendler as a Teachnig Fellow for the past two years, knows full well that when Vendler writes, the world of literary scholarship pays attention. In her work on Shakespeare and George Herbert, for example, Vendler revolutionized the way scholars and laymen alike perceive the sonnet and devotional poetry—focusing in on a previously ignored word can change the meaning of an entire poem or group of poems. “Basically, Professor Vendler is a monumental figure,” Miller says. “It has been said that she has the power to make or break poets’ careers.” Vendler’s invaluable contributions to the careers of contemporary poets Rita Dove and Seamus Heaney are evidence of this. She acknowledges that it is impossible to compare Yeats, one of the monolithic figures of the last two centuries of western literature, to modern poets.
But Vendler hopes to offer her readers, if not a new way to evaluate Yeats, at least a new lens through which to look at his poetry. “In the end,” Vendler says, “a critic can’t renew the process. All they can provide is a new way of looking at an old poet.” But she has helped turn criticism into an art form in and of itself.
