Best poetry critic alive. Prove me wrong if you can.
a) Writing in a scientific fashion, with almost mathematical precision;
b) Analyzing poems like a coroner or surgeon eviscerating a body: studying and cataloguing every word like organs that compose the whole of an anatomy;
c) Doesn’t get mystical. While she was analyzing Shakespeare’s sonnets she stated that a lot of critics want to see more in the poems then the poems really offer. She states that Shakespeare’s sonnets often offer only a small and un-complex message (love is a maddening fever; time is all destroying; progeny can be a small victory over time, etc.), and that’s not what makes them great – it’s the use of language, and not the thinking of the poet what makes them eternal;
d) Starts a book about Keats with this extremely pratical and realistic view of a poet’s work: “ ‘Whatever I do’, Keats cried in a 1926 letter, ‘poetry will remain a torture.’ Over and over in the intervals he had set aside for writing poems, he complains of the ‘strain’ of writing lyrics, of the ‘exhaustion’ they caused. ‘Creative work always ruins one’s nerves for a time’, he said as early as 1908. Keats best known comment of this sort appears in ‘Adams Curse’, as he asserts that getting a single line right can take hours. In ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion,’ he claims (and his letters bear it out) that for six weeks he had sought in vain for a theme; he speaks elsewhere of having to wait until his mind ‘fills up’ again, as if he had drained it dry. Even when he could not actually compose verse because of the pressure of other work, he often felt themes running thorough his head; at such times he entered ‘paragraphs’ or ‘sketches’ into a notebook summarizing the theme (and sometimes the internal evolution) of poems to be written up latter in verse form. What tormented him was the putting of his themes (and even the words used in prose sketches) into verse.”;
e)Showed courage when she stated that a Penguin Anthology of modern verse compiled by a black poet was flawed because it was more preoccupied with adding a lot of black, Latino and marginal poets to the collection (regardless of the merit of their poems) than with exposing a lot of facets of critically acclaimed poets (like Wallace Stevens), who were included with only some few scraps of their production.
She takes the cake. If you never read her, just do it now.
>showed courage when she stated that a Penguin Anthology of modern verse compiled by a black poet was flawed because
sounds good to me
Parker Young
INTERVIEWER
How is your study of the Shakespeare sonnets different from others? I gather you do not read with the usual social or cultural or moral agenda.
VENDLER
During the nineteenth century, the study of Shakespeare’s sonnets was governed by a biographical agenda. Later, it was also governed by the “universal wisdom” agenda: the sonnets have been mined for the wisdom of friendship, the wisdom of the acquiescence to time, the wisdom of love. But I’m more interested in them as poems that work. They seem to me to work awfully well (though not everyone thinks so). And each one seems to work differently. Shakespeare was the most easily bored writer that ever lived, and once he had made a sonnet prove out in one way, he began to do something even more ingenious with the next sonnet. It was a kind of task that he set himself: within an invariant form, to do something different—structurally, lexically, rhythmically—in each poem. I thought each one deserved a little commentary of its own, so I’ve written a miniessay on each one of the one hundred and fifty four.
INTERVIEWER Do you feel confined as a female critic in any way?
VENDLER No, I don’t think the mind is gendered. I know that’s not a popular position these days, but I never felt the mind to be gendered and perhaps that may be because I always read poetry. When I was a young girl reading and the page said, “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense,” or, “So are you to my thoughts as food to life,” it never occurred to me that these thoughts were not available to me because they had been uttered by an author who was male. I didn’t care who had uttered them. They seemed good things to say at a given moment.
>i like this
INTERVIEWER In the introduction to your latest collection of reviews, Soul Says, you speak of the soul and the self in the lyric as different from one another. Could you say a little bit about that?
VENDLER Well, with the rise of identity defined almost solely through race, ethnicity, or gender, I think we’ve forgotten the identity that speaks when one is speaking to oneself. That is to say, one is more conscious of those things—class, race, age, sex—when one is in the presence of others. It’s the difference principle that makes you consciously say, I am black and you are white; I am old and you are young; I am a woman and you are a man. But when you’re by yourself you don’t need so powerfully to assert any one of those identities; when you speak to yourself, you rarely say, I, as a woman, am saying this to myself, or, I, as a sixty year old, am saying this to myself. You tend merely to say, I am saying this to myself, because in the absence of others you can be yourself without external reference. Lyric comes out of that self that is less socially marked than the self that we normally refer to as our social identity. That’s why I took the title Soul Says from the title of a poem by Jorie Graham, because I think the word soul sums up the speaker of lyric.
>i like this
All memes aside user I feel 0.04% more intelligent having read this interview. Thanks for introducing Veeky Forums to Helen Vendler
Joshua Harris
>Writing in a scientific fashion, with almost mathematical precision Dumb STEM bitch
Noah Kelly
this bitch is based...
Samuel Butler
Wrong.
Lincoln Scott
>Writing in a scientific fashion >Doesn’t get mystical > extremely pratical and realistic view Missing half the fun desu.
“The occurrence of genius may be a mystery, but that is no good reason to get mystical about it. Harold Bloom, the most famous literary critic of the day, is very generous in assigning literary genius. “I can identify for myself certain writers of palpable genius now among us”, he writes in the introduction to Genius, a book composed with his on essays on writers for whom he claims genius: “the Portuguese novelist José Saramago, the Canadian poet Anne Carson, the English poet Geoffrey Hill, and at least a half-dozen North and Latin American novelists and poets (whom I forebear naming).” But he is considerably less generous in dispensing lucidity on what constitutes literary genius. Genius, he instructs, is “clearly both of and above the age”. He adds: “Fierce originality is one crucial component of literary genius, but this originality itself is always canonical, in that it recognizes and come to terms with precursors”. Genius also turns out to be “the god within”, and genius, “by necessity, invokes the transcendental and the extraordinary, because it is fully conscious of them”. He brings in Emerson and Gnosticism, neither of them great flags signifying clarity ahead, and concludes by stating that his rough but effectual test for the literary genius is: “Does she or he augment our consciousness…has my awareness been intensified, my consciousness widened and clarified?”.
"What widens one consciousness and intensifies one’s awareness, may, of course, not widen and intensify another’s consciousness. Or it may not do so the same consciousness at different times at the life of that consciousness, which is way some writers who swept us away at the age of twenty seem not worth rereading at forty. Nor is professor Bloom very helpful on the crucial matter of how literary genius operates, which is, inevitably, through style."
Mason Perry
Style, it needs to be understood, is never ornamentation or a matter of choice of vocabulary or amusing linguistics of mannerisms. Style, in serious writing, is a way of seeing, and literary genius, who see things in vastly different way than the rest of us, usually require a very different style. As Edward Gibbon wrote on style (quote by David Womerseley in his essay): “The style of an author should be the image of his mind”. Thorough this distinctive style something like a distinctive philosophy is expressed, thorough usually not directly: Which is where criticism and plain intelligent reading enter. Henri Bergson holds that understanding a work or body of art “consist essentially in developing in thought what artists want to suggest emotionally.” The style of the literary artist is what allows him powerfully to suggest what he sees.”
Robert Myers
He's pretty much the Neil deGrasse Tyson of literature. He's a popularizer, not a profound critic. Even his most famous idea about the anxiety of influence was not exactly groundbreaking. It's heavily indebted to Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
Gavin Reed
Who the fuck wants concise analytical definitions of literary genius anyways. Bloom makes his critique his own kind of poetry, and you grasp it in a fashion you would poetry. That's the appeal.
Aaron Brown
it isnt about finding a concise definition
bloom just names someone genius without really giving clarity as to why
i have read portions of Genius myself, and all he does is just name writers, explain who influenced them, and then goes onto the next "genius"
Carson Turner
I had her as a teacher. I have to say I agree.
Ryan James
no u didnt liar
Carson Scott
bloom is an adequate writer but i wouldn't call his prose "poetic" by any stretch. in fact i think you are profoundly mistaken if you grasp any sort of criticism "in a fashion you would poetry," whatever that means. anyway, i don't want my criticism to taste like poetry.
Mason Wright
poo
Jonathan Morales
Hmmmm
Levi Lopez
ya she good
Adam Rogers
Very nice woman. I was thankful for the chance to meet her
Juan Sanchez
Stop bumping this.
Adrian Stewart
Why?
Eli Robinson
I think you mean Yeats, not Keats.
Jaxon Morris
*blocks your path*
Samuel Turner
*le can't write anything but shit about L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E woman*
Eli Ramirez
Eeeeeeee I mean she is obviously skilled and intelligent, bit it's simplistic to assert that difference (i.e. race, sex) doesn't involve different lived experience and societal treatment, and that experiencially influenced worldview just goes away when one reads by oneself. As a little girl I also experienced poetry as universally similarly affecting, but now that I've experienced the world from my societal position as "woman" (+other qualifiers) my readings of literature are, dare I say, more nuanced
Liam Lopez
Cont'd You can appreciate her work and still try not to tokenize her.
Nicholas Sanders
I like Vendler in general. She's best with Stevens (this thread chooses to forget that he's her poet) and weakest with Dickinson. Her subscription to the Adorno of the Aesthetic Theory also is nowhere broached. Also, Bloom himself is a fan of Vendler and wd probably agree with OP on most her points. For whatever reason. The Music of what Happens, and Poems, Poets, Poetry are wonderfully helpful if youre just getting started.
