In contemporary criticism, Helen Vendler is a reliable brand name, like Pontiac, Budweiser or Steven Spielberg. When writing about poetry, her voice is dry, unexciting, a little clumsy and quite earnest – in a word, academic -- but she has had useful things to say about Shakespeare and Keats, and nothing good to say about Charles Olson, so we can excuse her fundamental dullness. Thanks to Dave Lull for sending a link to Vendler’s review of The Collected Poems: 1956-1998, by Zbigniew Herbert, in the Aug. 27 issue of The New Republic. The book was published more than six months ago, but Vendler seems to have spent the time living with Herbert’s flinty, reluctant poems. Her review is long and deeply meditated:
“…as the events of Herbert's era fade from memory, and as his contemporaries die, even such poems will be read as allegorical comments on recurrent human experience--human choice, human savagery, human hypocrisy. Indeed, the insistent de-specification practiced by Herbert is one of his many aesthetic choices in favor of reduction, restriction, limitation-- the techniques creating his instantly recognizable idiom.”
Vendler is a wise, prudent quoter. To prolong my enjoyment of what remains the most important book yet published in 2007, here’s an excerpt quoted by Vendler from “Mr. Cogito Reads the Newspaper”:
“it's no use trying to find
120 lost men on a map
a distance too remote
hides them like a jungle
"they don't speak to the imagination
there are too many of them
the numeral zero on the end
turns them into an abstraction
“a theme for further reflection:
the arithmetic of compassion”
And this, from “Mitteleuropa,” a poem Vendler doesn’t mention:
“Let it shine for a while
painted toy of a child
old man’s nostalgic dream
but between us I admit
I don’t believe any of it
(I might as well come clean)”
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2 comments:
Hi Patrick,
You might like to know that Harvard University Press will publish a new book by Vendler this fall. It's titled Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form. Here's a link to its page on the HUP website.
Best wishes from New York,
Brian
the great Marianne Moore on poetry that speaks to the imagination:
Poetry
by Marianne Moore
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician--
nor is it valid
to discriminate against "business documents and
school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make
a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
"literalists of
the imagination"--above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them,"
shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.
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