[In the following negative review of The Music of What Happens, Bawer derides Vendler's critical skills and condemns what he considers her unmerited and disproportionate influence as America's leading poetry critic.]

Helen Vendler is the colossus of contemporary American poetry criticism. In an age when the audience for poetry has dwindled down to a precious few, and when only a handful of general magazines even bother to publish poetry criticism at all, Vendler looms hugely over the ever-shrinking landscape. No one in America today has more power to create or to damage a poetic reputation. Even T. S. Eliot, in his time, did not exercise so considerable an influence upon American poetry as Vendler does at present. Simply to list her credits is to describe a degree of visibility, in relation to her peers, that no other critic of poetry has ever enjoyed in America. She is, first of all, the poetry critic—not simply a poetry critic, but the poetry critic—for the two most prominent journals in this country that feature poetry criticism, the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. （She has also reviewed poetry frequently for the New York Times Book Review.） She is the William R. Kenan Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University, and is the centerpiece of the American poetry criticism list of that university’s highly prestigious press. Not only does Harvard publish her books of criticism, furthermore—among them On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’s Longer Poems （1969） and Part of Nature, Part of Us （1980）—but when it came time to compile the Harvard Book of Contemporary Poetry （1985）, it was Vendler who was signed up as editor. Likewise, when the producers of the Public Broadcasting System’s recent “Voices and Visions” series about American poetry wanted a series consultant, it was Vendler whom they hired.

In short, Helen Vendler has assumed a singular, and a truly remarkable, place in the criticism of our time: she is that individual to whom a disproportionate number of the most influential editors, publishers, and producers automatically turn when the subject is poetry. In some of the most august editorial chambers in the country, to think of poetry criticism is to think of Helen Vendler. How, one may wonder, has this peculiar state of affairs come to pass? The answer is, I think, an involved, interesting, and instructive one. To begin with, it seems to me that Vendler’s prominence is directly related to the unprominent position of the art in which she specializes. Let me explain. A generation ago, it was a frequent complaint among poets that the typical educated American was ignorant of and uncomfortable with poetry; nowadays, alas, even the typical professional literary person—whether writer, editor, or publisher—is rather ignorant of and uncomfortable with it. And even those relative few who retain a lively interest in and affection for the poetry they learned in school don’t know much about the poetry that is being written today. Yet, every so often, such people must make decisions relating to contemporary poetry—decisions about review assignments, editing assignments, consulting assignments. In such an atmosphere, name recognition is all-important. An editor who knows little about contemporary poetry is unlikely to know much about those who do know something about it. He will tend, therefore, to go with a known quantity. What this means is that he will be likely to go for established poets and for big-name English professors at major universities.

But how many poets or academics of this description are actually capable of writing for a general audience about poetry these days? Not many. In growing numbers, the academics are irredeemable ideologues, straitjacketed by perverse conceptions of the nature of literary art （not to mention incapable, by and large, of producing readable prose）. How about the poets? After all, since the Renaissance it has been poets who have made the most estimable contributions to poetry criticism. One thinks, for instance, of Sidney’s “Apologie for Poetry,” Dryden’s “Essay of Dramatic Poesie,” Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, Arnold’s The Function of Criticism, and Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” As recently as a generation or two ago, the major American poetry critics—such people as Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, and Louise Bogan—were also distinguished poets. But things have changed dramatically. In our time, most American poets seem largely incapable of thinking critically or of writing competent, intelligent prose about their art; when they do want to say something, whether about their poetry or someone else’s, or indeed about the art of poetry in general, they tend to do so in interviews or published “conversations.” And what they have to say often proves to be astonishingly banal.

That leaves a relatively small number of suitable candidates for the role of American poetry critic to the multitudes—among them Helen Vendler. One factor in her favor is that she is not an ideological critic but, by her own description, an “aesthetic critic.” Quite admirably, she believes that a poem should be judged according to its value as a work of art and not according to its fealty to one or another set of extraliterary principles; she has little affection for poststructuralism, and even less for Marxist and feminist criticism. What’s more, she writes （for an academic） a relatively lucid prose, relatively free of jargon. All this makes her more welcome in the pages of a general-audience magazine like the New Yorker than many a member of the Derrida-era professoriat would be. Beyond these factors, however, the fact that Vendler, rather than some other, similarly qualified individual, came to be the most known of known quantities in her field is doubtless largely a matter of chance. What is certainly undeniable is that for some time now, the main factor in Vendler’s rising visibility has been the snowball effect: every time an editor, producer, or publisher taps her for another high-visibility assignment, the known quantity becomes even more of a known quantity. The problem of whom to retain for the occasional poetry assignment no longer exists. Thus does Vendler’s fame feed both upon itself and upon the very obscurity of the art she criticizes.

As I have suggested, Vendler’s role is doubly unprecedented. Not only is she the first American poetry critic to occupy so prominent a position in relation to her fellow American poetry critics; she is also the first non-poet to ascend to the first rank of those American critics who focus primarily on poetry. To my mind, the fact that Vendler does not write poetry （or, at least, does not publish it） is of considerable significance. For while such arts as music, painting, and architecture have often drawn their finest critics from the ranks of non-practitioners （e.g., Ruskin on art, Shaw on music）, poetry is different. Poetry shares a medium—the written word—with criticism. Accordingly it is a good deal easier to imagine, say, a person attracted to the writing of art criticism but not to the practice of painting, than it is to imagine a person who is at once （a） drawn by his talents and his passions to the vocation of a writer and （b） genuinely and deeply responsive to the music of poetry but who （c） has no gift for, or attraction to, the composition of poetry. Indeed, it is here, I believe, that Vendler’s principal deficiency as a poetry critic lies. For, deeply responsive though she may think herself to be to the music of poetry, the simple fact is that she lacks the one thing a critic of poetry cannot do without: a good ear. She has no taste. She is as likely to praise a bad poet as a good one, as likely to quote with admiration an awful stanza as an exquisite one. The poets whom she has attempted to add to the contemporary canon—notably Michael Blumenthal, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, and Charles Wright—are conspicuously and uniformly bad. Vendler claims to be an admirer of Wallace Stevens, but the positively awful taste she has displayed in regard to poets who are her age or younger suggests that if Stevens were Vendler’s exact contemporary, and had started publishing his poetry about the same time she started reviewing, she would never have paid any attention to him.

To be sure, Vendler has her virtues as a critic. Above all, she is good at taking poems apart and putting them back together again. Her explications of specific poems can be thoughtful and intelligent; she has a fine analytical mind, and can discuss with conviction and authority everything from a poem’s sound patterns to its structure of meaning. I share her desire, moreover, that students be familiar with “a hoard of poems in the mother tongue, known so intimately that they become nature, not art,” and her worry that “the classical and English canon may be slipping out of our grasp, to be replaced by a modern canon of unrhymed and translated pieces.” （Yet who has done more than Vendler herself to canonize contemporary poets with no gift for form?） I think she’s right to be uncomfortable when she sees a critic （Robert Hass） who can’t read Polish writing about a poet （Czeslaw Milosz） whose work is written in Polish. （Yet Vendler herself, who is equally unfamiliar with Polish, has herself written an essay about Milosz.） She is correct, too, in criticizing Dave Smith for the inconsistent tone of his essays, which are by turns chatty, hortatory, and academic—and yet she seems incapable of recognizing that much of Smith’s poetry, which she purports to admire, shares this same lack of tonal control. Which brings us back to her bad ear. Manifestly, Vendler’s failure to perceive the deficiencies of Dave Smith’s work is a vivid illustration of her inability to hear poems—and in an age when most other academic critics can’t hear them either, and when otherwise thoughtful and sensitive editors feel too intimidated by and unfamiliar with the subject of contemporary poetry to question her critical judgments, Vendler （to speak bluntly） manages to get away with this cardinal failing. Her power is such, moreover, that whereas there is probably no one else whose name stirs up so much heated negative comment when poets and poetry readers come together, virtually nobody else has ever dared to air his misgivings about her in print. More than one poet-critic known to gripe loudly about Vendler at literary gatherings has been known, upon being assigned a book of hers for review, to turn around and praise her fulsomely.

That Vendler’s ear for poetry has not improved in recent years is made painfully manifest in her newest book of critical essays, The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics. Reprinted not only from the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review, but also from the Times Literary Supplement, the New Republic, Salmagundi, Poetry, Critical Inquiry, the Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and two academic anthologies entitled What Is a Poet and Textual Analysis: Some Readers Reading, the thirty-six essays collected in this volume are concerned with the work of some thirty or so poets （from Wordsworth and Keats to Ashbery and Ginsberg）, with a handful of critics （e.g., Bloom, Barthes, Robert Hass）, and with—to quote the title of the opening essay—“The Function of Criticism.” It is while reading this very first essay that one begins to entertain grave doubts about the nature of Vendler’s responsiveness to poetry. For throughout much of this essay, Vendler’s emphasis is not upon the question of the value and purpose of literary criticism （which is, of course, an ancient and valid area of inquiry） but upon the question of the critic’s reason for writing criticism—the “motives for criticism,” as she puts it. The best Vendler can offer, by way of an answer to this question, is a frightening list of possible motives which she herself describes as “discreditable （if entirely human） ones … envy, competition, defensive reaction-formation, power-seeking, and spiritual parricide.”

Not a word does Vendler breathe about what, to my way of thinking, should be the foremost motive of any true poetry critic: a love of poetry so strong that one feels compelled to voice one’s reverence for the art’s most gifted practitioners, compelled to separate the wheat from the chaff, compelled to express one’s outrage whenever mediocrity is celebrated and beauty ignored, compelled to understand as well as possible what it is, in a given poem or body of work, that stirs one’s soul. Vendler’s failure even to give this motive a place on her list seems to me a mark of the thoroughly academic nature of her sensibility: to Vendler, plainly, criticism is not a calling but a profession. That this is indeed the case would seem to be supported by the revelation, in her 1980 collection Part of Nature, Part of Us, that her career as the nation’s number-one poetry reviewer began as the result of “a lucky chance”: “The Massachusetts Review annually commissioned someone to consider the year’s work in poetry, and in 1966, when I was teaching at Smith, I was asked to take it on.” Before that assignment, Vendler’s writing had been of the most routine professorial sort: she had published a few academic essays and a scholarly book entitled Yeats’s Vision and the Later Plays （which, by the way, she does not include in the dust jacket list of her “major books”）. Her turn to poetry reviewing seems quite clearly to have been less a case of a woman following her heart than of a professor making a savvy career decision.

Vendler is, indeed, an academic through and through. One often gets the impression that poetry is unimaginable, for her, outside the English department. Certainly it doesn’t occur to her that someone other than a university professor might read or write about poetry. （“[A] greater problem for those of us writing commentary on poetry,” she maintains in one essay, “is the American compulsion to ‘communicate,’ intensified by our profession as teacher.”） Her sensibility is essentially that of an academic clubbist. Though not a practitioner of literary theory, she nonetheless speaks of herself—and of everyone who writes criticism—as having “been put on notice, by the salutary sternness of literary theory, that our terms are likely to be interrogated.” Likewise, though she disagrees strongly with the assumptions of feminist criticism, she quite blithely accepts the feminists’ politicization of literature and their affirmative-action approach to the making of canons and reading lists as part of the academic status quo. （“As Sexton passes into the anthologies,” she writes, “the more obviously ‘feminist’ poems will no doubt be chosen, and there is no reason not to represent them.”）

Like a true academic, moreover, Vendler writes as if poetry without criticism is as valueless as an LP without a record player. The first chapter of The Music of What Happens concludes with the assertion that “[n]o art work describes itself,” that “[o]nly by repeated casts of the critical imagination is the world around us, including the world of literature, finally described and thereby made known, familiar, and integral.” （To be sure, the book’s introduction ends with the seemingly more modest observation that “the art of poetry is far larger than any single description of its powers”—yet would it even occur to a truly modest critic to make such a self-evident pronouncement?） Likewise, citing some lines in which Ashbery “asks for a new criticism, deriving from the actual current practice of poetry,” Vendler comments: “It is as though poetry were incompetent to see its own image until reflected in the discursive analysis of criticism. And it may be so.” One gets the impression, in fact, that what Vendler admires so much about the work of Ashbery is that it cries out for a critic to explain it; implicit in her feverish analyses of Ashbery’s poems is the notion that it is the very need for elaborate analysis that makes them deserving of attention. Vendler is strangely indifferent to the question of their actual merit, writing that “[n]o line, or … passage, or … inception or conclusion from Ashbery [can] be isolated as good or bad.” When she wants to give an Ashbery poem, “Songs without Words,” the ultimate accolade, she doesn’t say that it’s a great poem; rather—in a sentence that speaks volumes about the academic mentality—she writes, “Surely this poem will be anthologized.”

Yet the fact is that Vendler has a much better understanding of how anthologies are put together than of how poems are put together. Whenever she tries to think like a poet, she comes off as surprisingly obtuse. Quoting four lines from a Seamus Heaney poem （“They were two-faced and accommodating. / And seed, breed and generation still / they are holding on, every bit / as pious and exacting and demeaned.”）, she comments that “[t]he five adjectives and the four nouns in this passage … cannot be budged （as anyone can discover by trying to put ‘two-faced’ in the place of ‘demeaned,’ or ‘generation’ in the place of ‘seed’）.” Isn’t this true, however, of any good poem—that to rearrange the words would be to weaken it? Indeed, the very concept is a cliché; but one has the feeling that for Vendler it’s a fresh insight. She reveals this same obtuseness in an essay on Milosz, writing that the “linguistic versatility” demonstrated by Milosz and other poets—“combining words that have never been combined before, but doing it with a sublime justice and propriety, so that the effect is not a jolt but a confirmation of rightness—gives perhaps the highest pleasure that poetry exists to confer.” Then there’s a review of Amy Clampitt, wherein Vendler observes that “it is not just visual ‘rendering’ （by whatever analogies） that makes visual poetry ‘work.’ Poetic diction has its own laws that must be satisfied along with the requirements of the eye. Poetic diction demands that words be linked one to the other so that it will seem that they ‘grew’ there by natural affinity.” Well, yes, and yes again. But don’t we know these things already? Isn’t Vendler restating, in these sentences, the very definition of poetry: a sublimely pleasing, truly original, but thoroughly right-sounding combination of words? For Vendler to make such observations as if they were provocative and récherché, and not central to the practice of any first-rate poetry critic, is surpassingly odd—but, alas, entirely characteristic of her.

Even when she turns from poetry to life, Vendler makes remarks that seem astonishingly fatuous. Reviewing Stephen Spender’s journals, she suggests that his interest in politics may be “a result of his partly Jewish descent on his mother’s side” （where does that leave Auden and C. Day Lewis?） and comments that “Spender always remains a neophyte in life, capable of being hurt, shocked, surprised; when David Hockney tells him in 1983 about someone who had died of AIDS, he writes, ‘All this seems inexplicable, baffling, terrifying’—adjectives we associate more with adolescence than with the eighth decade of life.” Vendler’s implication here is that fear, confusion, and terror are things we leave behind when we become adults; on the contrary, one suspects that it is the rare person in the eighth decade of life who is not at least as familiar with these emotions as the average teenager. In adolescence, after all, we think ourselves immortal, and it is only as we age that we begin to grow wary and fearful of death; if we appear more serene than adolescents, it is not because we have shaken off fear, confusion, and terror, but because we have learned how to behave in public. In any event, it seems to me that a writer （of whatever age） who is no longer capable of being hurt, shocked, and surprised isn’t going to be writing much of value. Vendler exhibits this same distrust of emotion when she complains about Robert Hass’s poetry criticism that he is “sometimes, to my tastes, sentimental … too fond of coercive words: terrible, painful, wonderful, terrifying, agonizing, mysterious, shocking, raw, seductive. Such words not only say ‘Admire with me’; they are shopworn.”

As a rule, Vendler’s own professions of enthusiasm don’t convince. When she speaks, for instance, of “[Ted] Hughes’s remarkable adjectival gift,” or of “Ginsberg’s exuberant comedy,” her praise seems pro forma; when she says that Merrill’s rhymes “are the cleverest the language has seen since Byron,” it sounds hyperbolic. Her characterization of various poems as “shocking” rings especially false, if only because shock, for whatever reason, is one of the few types of emotional response to literature with which academic criticism seems wholly comfortable. Vendler refers, for example, to the “shock” with which one reads Sylvia Plath’s comparison of worms to “sticky pearls,” and she says of a line in a pallid Ashbery poem that “[a] middle-aged American reads ‘Hardly anything grows here’ with immediate recognition, a shock not possible any longer from the mention in a contemporary poem of ‘stubble plains’ or ‘the barrenness / Of the fertile thing that can attain no more.’” Vendler indulges, too, in what may be called the “no one else” formula:

[A]t his best [Michael Blumenthal] sounds like no one else. I cannot think of anyone in America just now who might write as Blumenthal does about looking down on one’s house after death.

There has not been for a long time a poem that sees us so helplessly in love with the rhythms of victimage and brutality, societal, sexual, and religious [as does Amy Clampitt’s “Easter Morning”].

[Ammons is] the first poet to have the conceptual equipment … to think this way. [That is, to reject anthropomorphism.]

Writing about Clampitt, Vendler says: “If Iowa has not had a poet before, it has one now”; in her essay on Ammons, she observes similarly that “[b]ecause of his coming, the literary map has changed, and as we have the New York of Whitman, and the Pennsylvania of Stevens, and the Massachusetts of Lowell, we now have the North Carolina of Ammons. There are states, many of them, still without a genius of the place. In celebrating the sixtieth birthday of A. R. Ammons, one celebrates as well the birth of North Carolina in his poems.”

What Vendler values most in poetry is that which she describes, in “The Function of Criticism,” as “the beautiful bizarre, not the beautiful familiar.” To her, a given poet’s most characteristic work—that is, his quirkiest, goofiest, most “original” work—is by definition his best. It follows from this that the quirkier a poet is, the better—and that when Vendler calls Merrill, for instance, “firmly idiosyncratic,” she means it as the highest of praise. At the beginning of On Extended Wings, Vendler announces that her “touchstone has been the best Stevens could do—those poems in which he seems most himself, most original.” Not surprisingly, this aesthetic criterion makes for some peculiar critical judgments: Vendler claims to prefer Stevens’ “The Auroras of Autumn” to “Sunday Morning,” and states that “the poem characteristic of Ginsberg, the one he writes over and over, is seen in its purest form in the faultless ‘American Change.’” In “Looking for Poetry in America,” she argues that “[e]very perception, without exception, does indeed, in poetry, need to be rendered strikingly.” One would be more comfortable with this formulation if it had made use of a different adverb: eloquently, perhaps, or beautifully. Though it can serve as a synonym for either of these words, strikingly also connotes shock value, noticeably for its own sake.

（And we’ve already seen, of course, how prominently the word shock figures in Vendler’s criticism.）

In the first paragraph of a piece on Stevens, Vendler makes it clear that, to her mind, greatness and conservativism are antithetical: “Was Stevens good? great? original? or reactionary? conservative? derivative?” Later in the same essay, speaking of Milton Bates’s book Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self, she expresses the hope

that a new generation of readers, brought up on this book, will recognize that the naive canards about Stevens—that he was a heartless hedonist, an ivory-tower poet insensitive to social distress, a cold, over-cerebral aesthete, a poetic conservative, and so on—are all untrue. Bates’s book rightly describes Stevens as a poet constantly enlarging the self … aware of social unrest, passionately concerned with the accurate way of conceiving the artist’s role in the social order, evaluating the claims of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche long before most members of his generation. …

Patently, Vendler is eager here to rescue Stevens from the charge of being a conservative, formalist intellectual, and to help create an image of him not only as an aesthetic innovator but as a social and political rebel who was, by the standards of the American academy in the 1980s, politically correct. Vendler seems utterly unaware that it is Stevens’ intellectuality, his austere aesthetic consciousness, and his powerful sense of form—not his politics, whatever they may have been—that make him a great poet.

A corollary of Vendler’s love of the idiosyncratic is that she likes poets whose poems run away from them, and dislikes poets who know what they want to say and how they want to say it. Taking note of a description of clouds in a poem by Charles Wright, Vendler comments admiringly that whereas “in another poet visual accuracy would be uppermost, in Wright the symbolic arbitrariness of the mind’s play [my emphasis] is at least as visible in such passages as any putative appearance of the clouds.” She is equally impressed by Dave Smith, whose poems she finds “torrential, impatient, exasperated,” and whose language is “theatrical, even melodramatic.” She is less happy with Adrienne Rich and Philip Levine, whose poems aren’t as “wayward” as Vendler would like: “They [Rich and Levine] are stern, even grim, ringmasters to their poems, and the hoops, once aligned at the beginning, remain in place in the poem for all subsequent jumps. One longs, reading Rich’s A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far （1981）, for the poem to take an unexpected byway, to reverse itself, to mock itself, to question its own premises, to allow itself, in short, some aesthetic independence.” It is, needless to say, a most questionable notion that a poem should be “aesthetically independent” of its author; but this sort of idea is typical of Vendler.

Vendler doesn’t like poems that say something—or, more accurately, she’s very strict about the ways in which she thinks it is proper for a poem to say something. She draws a rigid distinction between art （as exemplified by painting and music） and discourse （philosophy, history, etc.）, and finds it highly problematic that writing straddles both categories. Though at least once, in The Music of What Happens, she describes poetry as partaking of each of these tendencies （“The reflective and discursive verse of paradox represents one extreme of lyric; the opposite extreme is song. Song and reflection are the two sources of lyric, and poems move along a continuum between them”）, she seems more often to see true poetry as “action,” not “discourse”—as belonging, that is, only in the category of art. The more predominant the rhetorical or intellectual content of a poem, then, the less Vendler is likely to think of it as a true poem. She dismisses “This Dust Was Once the Man,” for instance, as the work of Whitman “the orator-eulogist,” not of Whitman the poet. What’s more, in order to feel comfortable praising a poem widely thought to contain ideas, she finds it necessary to underplay, or even to deny, the presence of those ideas in the poem. Thus she ridicules Lionel Trilling’s reading of Keats’s “Immortality” ode as a statement of certain ideas about life. Time and again in Vendler’s essays, language-as-action wins the day. Though she admires “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” for instance, Vendler finds the poem flawed insofar as it does not approach the “vigor of language which we find in ‘Song of Myself’ or ‘As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life’”; to the extent that the poem is “stately,” imprisoned in “the fetters of a formal occasion and a formal genre,” it deviates from Vendler’s ideal of the “purely lyric” poem. It is in accordance with this conception of poetry that she distinguishes sharply between words and ideas, saying that “a writer who loves words—all words, single words—for their materiality and for their image-inspiring power is at the furthest remove from someone who loves ‘ideas.’” A real poetic mind, in her view, “thinks in images.” （Where does that leave Alexander Pope?）

One of Vendler’s favorite words of approbation is fluid—a lexical choice that seems to follow from an envisioning of discourse as solid, art as liquid. Thus she speaks of Ashbery’s “fluid syntax,” says that “Louise Glück’s sense of myth, while as firm as Ashbery’s, is less fluid,” and notes that A. R. Ammons “is sure that the number of fluid inner states is infinite … and the only mediating instrument between the liquid currents of mind and the mountains and deserts of matter is language.” Often her distinctions between the fluid and the not-so-fluid are, to say the least, rather murky: “Ashbery’s fluidity puts us in the res cogitans as it carries on its marvelous observations and retoolings; Glück’s sternness reminds us that we have also a precipitate, a residue, from life’s fluidity—that which we recite by heart, the immutable, the unadorned, the skeletal, the known.”

As some of these quotations may suggest, Vendler would seem to spend much of her time trying to figure out what to say about a given poet or poem, in the manner of one to whom the act of criticism doesn’t come at all naturally. The questions about the purpose of poetry criticism which she raises in “The Function of Criticism” never seem to be put to rest. She begins a piece on the criticism of Dave Smith, Robert Hass, and Robert von Hallberg by asking “What is there to say about a poem? about poetry? about a national poetry? about a poetry and the culture from which it issues?” On the first page of a piece about Harold Bloom, she says: “there has been a good deal of difficulty in knowing what it is proper to say about a lyric poem beyond what can be said about human imaginative expression in general.” To be sure, the purpose of poetry criticism is certainly a valid subject for discussion, but Vendler returns to this question so often that you get the feeling she really doesn’t know why she’s reading verse and writing about it, aside from the fact that the New Yorker pays well and that it’s good for her career. At times one feels like yelling at her: “For heaven’s sake, if you really don’t know why you’re writing about poetry, then why don’t you just keep quiet?”

And the fact is that time and again Vendler gives evidence that she really doesn’t know what to say about a poem. Like many academics, she sometimes seems to think that it is the job of the critic to discover （or pretend to discover） in a work of literature a controlling theme or structural principle that no one has ever noticed before. Implicit in criticism of this kind is the conceit that everyone who has previously read the work under discussion has misunderstood it; the paradox of such criticism is that any work capable of being so ubiquitously misunderstood could hardly be regarded as effectively constructed in the first place, and thus could hardly be considered deserving of such close critical attention. Sensible but kind English teachers euphemistically call interpretations of this kind “ingenious”: while they show a certain inventiveness, they have relatively little to do with the actual work of literature supposedly under consideration. Much of Vendler’s criticism has been of this sort; her book on Keats, for instance, centers upon a dubious interpretation of the odes as a coherent sequence. Equally dubious readings occur in the present book. The essay “Reading Walt Whitman” offers an interpretation of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” which is based on the notion that the poem represents a radical reworking of certain passages from earlier poems; Vendler argues that an awareness of these borrowings is essential to a full appreciation of the poem’s pathos. While there are indeed similarities between parts of “Lilacs” and some of these earlier passages. Vendler describes the composition of “Lilacs” in a way that, it seems to me, would sound utterly foreign to anyone who had ever actually written a poem. And she engages in rather too much mind-reading: “Other fragments pressed forward in Whitman’s mind as he composed. … It was in ‘Lilacs’ that Whitman sought to find a middle ground between triumph and ‘the mournful voices of the dirges pour’d around the coffin’. … He wished to find, in the language of perception, an equivalent for transcendence.” The lamentable consequence of such an approach is to make Whitman sound less like Whitman than like Helen Vendler. It is one thing for a critic to write about poems in the language of a critic; it is another for a critic to write about poets as if they thought like critics. Whatever genuine insights Vendler may have into a poem’s form and meaning are rendered considerably less valuable by her thorough inability to understand the way a real poetic mind actually goes about creating form and meaning.

And yet Vendler has many of her readers convinced that she not only understands poetry, but also has a special insight into the nature of American poetry. Indeed, though she’s written books about English classics—among them The Odes of John Keats （1983） and The Poetry of George Herbert （1975）—Vendler is best known as a critic of American poetry. She has some very firm, and questionable, ideas about the subject. Like many critics, she recognizes certain qualities as being more prevalent in American poems than in their English or Continental counterparts; but she goes further than this, arguing that the very presence of these qualities in American poems makes the poems more American than poems without these qualities, and consequently makes them better. If she admires Ashbery so much, it is largely because “Ashbery is an American poet, always putting into his poems our parades and contests and shaded streets. He sometimes sounds like Charles Ives in his irrepressible Americana.” Indeed, “Ashbery’s gift for American plainness is his strongest weapon.” Yes, Ashbery’s poetry is full of clichés—but this is perfectly fine with Vendler, who claims that “Ashbery’s deep literary dependencies escape cliché by the pure Americanness of his diction.” What Vendler is trying to say in this characteristically clumsy sentence, I think, is that the clichés in Ashbery’s poetry are American clichés—that he writes the way we really talk here in America—and that his work therefore can’t be faulted as poetry. On the contrary, Vendler would have us believe that those American clichés give Ashbery’s work much of its strength. Ashbery, she writes, “insist[s], by his manner, that everything that is ‘in English’ has to be written over ‘in American’”; to Vendler, this is precisely what an American poet should insist upon. She proffers an example of the contrast between British English and the “American language” of Ashbery’s poetry:

If Keats’s sonnet reads,

When I have fears that I may cease to be
           Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charact’ry,
          Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;

then Ashbery will write,

I think a lot about it,
Think quite a lot about it—
The omnipresent possibility of being interrupted
While what I stand for is still only a bare canvas:
A few traceries, that may be fibers, perhaps
Not even these but shadows, hallucinations …

… The “educated” reader thinks that “poetry” must sound Keatsian, rhythmic, and noble. But our American language cannot speak in those “noble accents / And lucid inescapable rhythms” （Stevens） without modification. “I think a lot about it” is how we say “When I have fears.”

To Vendler, in short, British English is “noble,” American English colloquial. But surely every language has its high and low levels of diction. Vendler’s implication here seems to be that in England, in Keats’s time, common people actually talked in the elevated language of Keats’s poetry, and that this alone made it proper for him to use such language in his work. Nonsense. In the same way, she appears to be saying that what validates Ashbery’s poetry is that it represents the way we actually talk in America nowadays. But though the first two lines quoted from Ashbery seem colloquial enough, the rest of the quotation—beginning with “The omnipresent possibility of being interrupted”—doesn’t sound any more colloquial than Keats. The main difference between the language of these lines and that of Keats’s poetry is not that one is “noble” and the other colloquial, or that one is English and the other American, but that Keats’s words are beautiful and expressive and Ashbery’s are banal and unattractive. Vendler acknowledges Ashbery’s prosiness; indeed, she praises the poem for its “flat American beginning.” To her, clearly, a flat, prosaic American poem is a distinctly American poem—and the more distinctly American an American poem is, of course, the greater a poem it is. When Vendler wants to praise a poet who does not fit into this formula, such as James Merrill, she feels compelled to apologize for, or explain away, his artfulness: “Merrill’s diction, though it can be fully literary [ugh!], is also colloquial and topical [huzza!], and in that way, though he generally writes in meter [alas!], he writes in the current language of America [yippee!].”

Vendler is uninhibited in her praise of Ashbery for his “comic” and “eclectic” use of the American language. Lines containing the expressions “show through” and “run out of” inspire her to rejoice in our native idioms: “when did ‘to run out of something’ become our normal way of saying that the supply was exhausted?” Look it up in your OED, Mrs. Vendler: the first citation of “run out of” dates back to 1713, to an English writer; in fact, it’s not a uniquely American idiom at all. Nor is “show through,” both of whose OED citations are of nineteenth-century English writers. In short, these aren’t exclusively American idioms at all. But what does this matter, anyway? What does the provenance of these expressions have to do with the aesthetic value of poems in which they happen to appear? The fact is that while Ashbery does make frequent use of such idioms—which are really more distinctively colloquial than they are distinctively American—he rarely does anything interesting with them; if Vendler sincerely wants to see clever and funny uses of genuine colloquial American English, she’d be better off looking at the lyrics of Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, and Johnny Mercer, say, than at the poetry of John Ashbery.

Throughout The Music of What Happens, “Americanness” serves as a well-nigh inflexible criterion of poetic excellence. If Vendler is less enthusiastic than one would like her to be about Elizabeth Bishop, it is largely because Bishop “resists the label ‘American poet’: there is in her work no self-conscious rebellion against English genres, or even English attitudes, of the sort we find in our poetry from Whitman and Dickinson on.” It is largely on this account that Vendler compares Bishop unfavorably with Ashbery; on similar grounds, she compares Robert Frost unfavorably with A. R. Ammons. However much one may admire Ammons, one cannot but be embarrassed for Vendler when she remarks disparagingly that “when we read Ammons … we see how distant Frost is from his rural characters, even when they are adapted from his own experience.”

Patently, Vendler has extraordinary ideas about the distinctions between American and non-American sensibilities. For instance, she writes in a review of Robert von Hallberg’s American Poetry and Culture, 1945–1980 that

The reasons why the general public [in America] does not read poetry are probably neither political （“Read those outlaws? those fascists? never!”） nor psychological （“I never could figure out that difficult stuff”）. Rather, the reasons for the marginal status of lyric poetry tend, I would guess, to be largely historical and institutional. Poetry is not systematically and intensively taught in America as it is in Europe; since most world poetry does not reflect American history or culture, it has been thought irrelevant to our nation. Each European nation cherishes its poetry （and the classical poetry born on the same soil from which it grew） as part of the deposit of patriotism, and therefore institutionalizes it in the schools. There are no such reasons for America to institutionalize Virgil or Milton. A critic’s demonstration that poetry is really about your life and mine and can be understood without difficulty cannot institutionalize poetry in America if a large social commitment to it as a patriotic value did not exist.

Well! All this American can say, in response to these observations, is that he, for one, read a good deal of poetry in the New York public schools he attended as a child. The main problem with poetry in America is not that people don’t read it in school but that they don’t read it once they get out of school. （But then Vendler wouldn’t recognize such a problem, because poetry is, to her, an academic phenomenon; sometimes you get the feeling that if she weren’t being paid to do so, she wouldn’t be reading poetry either.） Likewise, in an essay on Roland Barthes, Vendler writes that “[t]he intellectual formation of a French child attracted to literature is hardly imaginable to Americans. We are unfamiliar with those sacred French institutions the cahier （the notebook in which never a blot can appear）, the dictée （the oral dictation in which faults of spelling and punctuation are subsequently mercilessly reproved）, the manuel littéraire （a potted version of literary history）—all the furniture of the school and the lycée.” Sorry to break it to you, Mrs. Vendler, but many of us who attended school in America can identify well enough with such things—we had our notebooks checked for neatness, punctuation and spelling, and even had our equivalents of the manuel littéraire. The same ridiculous sort of contrast appears in a piece on Yale critic Geoffrey Hartman and his book Criticism in the Wilderness. Vendler readily accepts Hartman’s notion that American students are congenitally less competent readers of poetry because （in her words） “they haven’t the cultural equipment to read it,” not having “grown up in that architectural and civic context which surrounds Europeans and reminds them that art always issues from a historical, religious, and philosophical ground.” This is absurd. Vendler speaks as if “cultural equipment” were something that Europeans are issued at birth, like football helmets and kneepads; as if culture were something that one absorbed from buildings, like ground radiation, rather than from learning.

Similarly, in her article on Milosz, Vendler writes that “[t]here are no direct lessons that American poets can learn from Milosz. Those who have never seen modern war on their own soil cannot adopt his tone; the sights that scarred his eyes cannot be seen by the children of a young provincial empire. A thousand years of history do not exist in American bones, and a culture secular from birth cannot feel the dissolution of the European religious synthesis, on which Milosz dwelt in The Witness of Poetry, his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard.” Where does one begin to argue with this? First of all, the ghosts of John Winthrop, Roger Williams, Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, and their fellow New England colonists would be surprised to hear that America has been “secular from birth.” Vendler writes about Americans, furthermore, as if we sprang up day before yesterday from the Virginia soil, with no churches, no forebears, no libraries, no awareness of world history, no consciousness of a heritage beyond these shores. Certainly a thoughtful and imaginative American is as capable of feeling “a thousand years of history” in his bones as well as any European; for the fact is that people exist not merely as pieces of a culture but as individuals. And it is as individuals, furthermore, that they read poetry and experience the emotions that it communicates. Too often Vendler, in her eagerness to promulgate sweeping definitions of America, its people, and its culture, ignores this simple fact.¹

And too often she ignores such things as grace and clarity of style. For a writer whose job it is, in large part, to make delicately nuanced judgments about other writers’ use of language, Vendler has perpetrated more than a few breathtakingly awful sentences. Some are disfigured by ugly jargon: “Keats declares that art requires a social cooperation between the encoder-artist and the solitary decoder-beholder. … In the sonnet ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be,’ Keats summons up a rich gestalt.” （Would anyone who honestly responded to the music of Keats willingly sign her name to such sentences?） She can be sloppy about sentence logic （“Such passages alternate with a more relaxed mood”） and diction （she refers to Seamus Heaney’s colorful life as “an extreme sequence”）; and sometimes she simply churns out the same sort of phony, fuzzy, fatuous prose that one may find under the bylines of a thousand overworked, underinspired professors on the publish-or-perish treadmill: “[Barthes] exemplifies his own definition of the human person—a consciousness constituted by the available languages of its social and historical era.” Or: “Wordsworth is following, in his ode, the classic proportions of elegy.” Or: “[Spender] takes upon himself the full consciousness of happenings in countries other than his own.” Or: “Leithauser’s search for perfection has, I think, been insufficiently noticed.” Interestingly, the pieces in this book that were originally published in the New Yorker are considerably more well written than the others; indeed, one can tell from the first paragraph whether an essay is from that magazine or not. This may be a reflection of the famous extent and expertise of New Yorker editing, or it may simply indicate that Vendler puts more effort into her contributions to her flagship magazine than into her work for other publications.

Vendler herself has described her style as “Francophone and rhapsodic,” and while I don’t think that rhapsodic is quite the correct word, there are altogether too many sentences in The Music of What Happens in which Vendler’s reach exceeds her grasp. She writes of Whitman’s perceptions, for instance, that they “diffuse into the oceanic or the impalpable, as they draw further away from the senses and closer to the pure rhythmic utterance of words forming in air.” （How’s that again?） Similarly, she comments about a Seamus Heaney poem that “[t]he aesthetic claim made by a poem like this is that the passage of life can indeed be tallied in a narrative, and that the physical processes of life exquisitely resemble the mental ones, with a fluid sliding of import between them.” She writes that Louise Glück’s “struggle to find a fluent that is not false is the shadow-twin of her claim that there is a fixed that is not marred.” （This sentence is a little clearer in context, but no more graceful.）

Pretentious diction abounds in Vendler’s essays. Though she pretty much avoids poststructuralist argot （e.g., metataxis, paralogical, intertextuality）, she delights in words like appetitive, cotemporal, and methodized, uses instance as a verb, speaks of “transcultural philosophic universals” and “linguistic economies,” and refers （in various essays） to Whitman’s “perceiving apparatus,” A. R. Ammons’s “conceptual equipment,” and Charles Wright’s “descriptive equipment.” The word enables is a favorite （Vendler tells us that folk tales “enabled [Sexton] as a satirist” and that a certain realization “enables the song of the bird” in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”）. So is enact. She explains how poets resist the pressure to be political “by enacting an aesthetic which embraces social reality in an algebraic way”; how “[a]rt, in its social function, … enacts for us the paradox of our orderly symbolic capacity as it exists within the disorder it symbolizes”; how two poems by Heaney and Milosz “enact [the poem’s] … necessary connection with social reality”; and how “stiff resolve and chagrined change of heart are enacted in separate [Davie] poems.” In some essays she seems especially to favor pairs of esoteric nouns or adjectives, speaking, for example, of the “phrasal and atomistic” nature of perception, of Spender’s “continuities and disruptions,” of Hughes’s “predatory and avian” poetry in Crow, of the way Heaney “aggrandized and consecrated his infant world,” of the “trenchant and pugnacious self visible in Donald Davie’s prose,” of the “prophecy and peccancy” of Davie’s verse, of the way a certain Davie poem “ends in temporariness and temporizing,” of the “stinting and bare” quality of a second Davie poem, and of the “processional and epigrammatic” syntax of a third. （Vendler’s characterization of her own style as “Francophone and rhapsodic,” of course, also belongs in this category.）

There are many other things about Vendler’s criticism that one could choose to elaborate upon. One might mention, for instance, the extremely narrow range of writers to whom Vendler is in the habit of making passing references; throughout The Music of What Happens, she continually cites either Keats, Stevens, or Ashbery （or all three） for purposes of comparison, even though in most cases none of these names seems remotely relevant to the discussion. But enough. It is not my intention here to enumerate every last flaw of Vendler’s critical method. Nor do I mean to suggest that there are not even less competent people than Vendler writing about poetry these days; on the contrary, America certainly has its share of critics （not to mention celebrated contemporary poets） who, notwithstanding their intelligence, knowledge, and analytical skills, are crippled by perverse aesthetic criteria and by a tin ear. Far be it for me to suggest, then, that Vendler’s deficiencies as a critic are in any way unparalleled. What is exceedingly disturbing, however, is that these deficiencies have never been written about prominently and at length, and that this altogether pragmatic public silence which her fellow critics have maintained in regard to her shortcomings has enabled her to accrue power and influence out of all proportion to her deserts. While Helen Vendler, in short, is not a thoroughly bad critic, it is without question a thoroughly bad thing that she wields such unparalleled influence upon the direction of American poetry in our time.

Note

1. Besides, it might be convincingly argued that since it is much more common in America than in Europe for an individual to claim descent from several different Old World national groups, the typical American individual has a more natural “feel” for European history, in Vendler’s sense, than the typical European. But of course it is silly to make such comparisons in the first place.