SOURCE: A review of Soul Says, The Breaking of Style, and The Given and the Made, in Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 97, No. 3, July, 1998, pp. 458-66.

[In the following review, Burt discusses Vendler's critical perspective and summarizes her analysis of various poets in Soul Says, The Breaking of Style, and The Given and the Made.]

These three books, a remarkable harvest for one year, are in a way occasional works. Soul Says is mostly a collection of reviews, and the other two books are published versions of two series of lectures given in 1993 and 1994. To call these works occasional, however, is in no way to criticize them, for they show the spontaneity and shrewdness of insight that is characteristic of Vendler’s work. Vendler is here, as always, particularly adept at seeing the poetry of a poem from within, at registering the poem in a disciplined and self-critical way upon a responsive sensibility. Somehow in the last few years, however, what Vendler does has come to need defending.

How did it happen that liking poetry and thinking it has something to say became bad things? The promotional material sent with these books by Harvard University Press describes them, somewhat defensively, as issuing from a “conservative aesthetic.” But it is hard to see how anything in this book should count as “conservative” in any meaningful sense of that word. Although literary theorists have delighted in imagining the dire political consequences that follow from valuing sensibility （tying, for example, respect for poetic inwardness to the me-first egocentricity they associate with “late capitalism”）, the chains of implication which tie that aesthetic to those consequences are by no means chains of iron, and in fact for the most part have no stronger basis than analogy-mongering. Indeed, not long ago precisely the opposite point was being made about the specific political bearing of imaginative inwardness, which was then felt, on grounds no weaker than those the contemporary view employs, to serve progressive politics.

This is not to say that sensibility never has a political bearing. Even Vendler, who sometimes says that “Poetry will not make us better citizens,” praises Seamus Heaney’s poetry for bringing human depth to political quarrels where humanity is hard to keep in play, and criticizes Rich （and sometimes Lowell） for a crudeness and simplemindedness that is not only imaginative in nature. Imagination does have political affiliations, but it’s not obvious that all of those affiliations are on the same side. Like all essentially contested concepts, aesthetic inwardness is the common blessing and the common bane of every party. Vendler’s very forthright allegiance to the aesthetic may well foreclose some views of the relationship between poetry and politics, and it may blind her to the work of some poets, but for the most part it not only leaves the question of the relationship between poetry and politics an open one, but also leaves it far more open than competing views do.

A more telling distinction than that between “conservative” and “subversive” （to use the contemporary talismanic word of praise） is that between scholar and critic. Of course, most literary professionals play both roles all the time, sometimes carefully weighing the evidence for a claim, sometimes illuminating the inner suggestiveness of a poem through an act of intuitive sympathy. But the two roles are often in tension. What separates the scholar and the critic is not the division between fact and value but the difference between demonstration and intuition as ways of knowing. Certainly to those with the scholar’s caution and skepticism about claims whose grounds cannot be fully brought into the daylight, what the critic does appears to be not only lacking in rigor but to depend upon mystification. Little of what the critic does meets the scholar’s standard of proof, and the critic’s trust in a poem’s “feel” and a critical “ear” must always seem to the scholar to be a kind of covert appeal to authority: “People who have good taste （like me） think this way; if you don’t, that’s your problem.”

Part of the difference between these two points of view is a quarrel about what kind of knowledge the knowledge of poetry is. An aesthetic experience of a poem always involves somehow “playing” the poem upon a trained sensibility. And the scholarly temperament is, not without reason, suspicious of any claim that can only be validated in the shadowy regions of inwardness. But the fact that aesthetic experiences depend upon a kind of inwardness does not mean that they are “subjective” in the sense one means that term when one uses it as a term of abuse.

Sensibility has a curious kind of objectivity after all: it is at least partly detached from wish-fulfillments, from force of will, and from the unexamined guiding commonplaces of culture, since it sometimes runs counter to all of these. Whatever the much-abused phrase “the autonomy of art” means, it means that aesthetic responses are at least partly free of such ulterior motives or at least cannot wholly be explained on their basis. Nor is sensibility entirely the creature of whim, since it demands a principled self-consciousness from which one expects some account of its inner logic even if the ultimate origins of an aesthetic response remain mysterious. Like all arts, criticism can be described as a complicated dance between intuition and method in which each is engaged by and checked by and deepened by the other. The fact that its methods are not and cannot be formal does not mean that it lacks method or that its appearance of method is only the product of indoctrination in the reigning nonsense. One knows critical method in the way one knows how to dance—one is initiated into a practice which is deeper than merely knowing the steps, and from within that practice even the freedom of improvisation not only is conditioned by discipline but expresses an insight into the meaning of that discipline. That the method cannot be formalized is a sign of its depth, not of its shallowness or lack of rigor.

The inwardness of sensibility is not quite privacy either: we do talk about aesthetic experiences with each other, and our experiences develop in an ongoing engagement with the sensus communis about such matters. But sensibility is not totally the prisoner of the sensus communis; artists do sometimes make the taste by which they are to be enjoyed, and critics find upon reflection that their sensibilities will turn in directions contrary to their already acknowledged tastes. Sensibility has a way of catching one unawares: one keeps finding one’s self intrigued or drawn to things that one had assumed one wouldn’t be at all interested in, and in following those things out one has at least to imagine a world larger than that circumscribed by one’s preconceptions.

Knowledge of poetry is not knowledge about poetry but knowledge through poetry. It presents poetry not as a thing known but as a habit or occasion of knowing. One knows a poem not the way one knows the melting temperature of lead but the way one knows those few people one loves best. And what one says about a poem in criticism is no more a rigorous description of that poem than the poet’s blazon is of the beloved: both are occasions not for analysis but for intimacy, but it is an intimacy that requires delicate handling and which there are any number of ways of getting wrong. Poetry requires a severe discipline, like love, and although it resists being formalized it also rewards those who strenuously follow out its trains of thought with a deepened and more variegated experience of its central but never to be fully articulated truths.

The traditional attack upon sensibility-based criticism, that because it is under-theorized it is a prisoner of an implicit theory it does not have the discipline to be self-conscious about, assumes, reasonably enough but also, I believe, mistakenly, that a way of reading poetry must be able to justify itself all the way down to something like first principles. But the first principles of a literary theory do not have a deeper reality than poems do, for claims about the first principles of literary interpretation always issue from someone who is at the moment not engaged in that art. When people are asked to describe the rules of a game they play brilliantly, they often, with perfect seriousness, describe the game inaccurately. So it is with literary theory: its claims have the same relationship to literary criticism that school-house grammar has to language.

Every serious reader of poetry has had his or her views of poetry transformed by particular poems in ways nothing in his or her intellectual history could have predicted. Readers have this experience because sensibility has depths of implicitness that are not plumbed by constructions from first principles. To retort that poetry only transforms us in ways we are already ready to be transformed （although we didn’t know it yet）, and that therefore poems never bring us to a new way of thinking but only confirm what is already implicit in our ideologies, is to confuse the object of explanation with the grounds of explanation. Traditionally one proves the political inevitability of such a transformation retrospectively: once it has already happened, one puts together a story that accounts for it. But doing that proves nothing, because anybody can cobble together a plausible retrospective account （and it’s safe to say that had the transformation taken precisely the opposite turn, one could have cobbled together an equally plausible retrospective account）. To make the ideological case persuasively one has to predict such a transformation before it happens, and that one is unlikely to do with any more reliability than astrological predictions have.

Sensibility-based criticism must concede to the scholarly view that sensibility will always be a matter of phronesis and can never provide the certainty of theoria. But to concede this is not to concede that sensibility comes down to subintellectual impressionism. Phronesis has discipline just as theoria does; but it is a discipline that one can only be initiated into by practice. Indeed, it is the very things which most drive the scholarly-minded to the view that criticism is hopelessly flabby that are most central to the critic’s view of what the discipline of his or her discipline is.

Theoria and phronesis have different assumptions about the relationship between the patterned and the predictable. For theoria the patterned and the predictable are the same, and if one’s account of a pattern is not borne out by predictions made on its basis, then one’s account is incorrect. Phronesis, by contrast, is concerned with occasions where patterning and predictability are opposed to each other: an artistic invention unfolds in a state of endless becoming, changing restlessly enough so that it avoids staleness but never so restlessly that it becomes entirely unintelligible. It solicits the expectation of pattern, yet at every scale it must continuously alter, transform, rethink, or deepen what its sense of that pattern is, so that one’s accounts of that pattern are always retrospective and never are fully predictive of how that pattern will develop.

The failing of both the scholarly and the literary-theoretical view of poetry, relative to the critical view of poetry, is that they seek to apply the conditions of theoria to what only phronesis is capable of rendering intelligible. It is the ambition of those views—and it is especially the ambition of ideology theory—to use the evidence of pattern as evidence of predictability. But to be satisfied with that kind of account of the work we must programmatically ignore the very things that make that work live.

One of the attractive features of trust in one’s sensibility is sensibility’s habit of opening up to one poems one might not have anticipated being to one’s taste. The twenty-one essays in Soul Says deal with a wide variety of poets, and Vendler reads them with an open mind. She often will try on the poet’s convictions for size, so that when she discusses a poet of the high style such as Merrill, she adopts, provisionally but not merely for convenience, a vision of poetry which opens for her the virtues of “intricacy of form, and teasing obliqueness of content,” from the point of view of which a more populist poetry such as Whitman and Frost wrote seems “gross, heavy-footed, ugly” （p. 35）. Yet when she thinks about the more exoteric poets, she never seems to be slumming, and the power of that kind of poetry is not lost on her either. Like James, and like the poets she admires, she is one of those upon whom nothing is lost.

Soul Says covers a wide variety of poets, which alone is a testament to the catholicity of Vendler’s taste. Thoughtful appreciations of some of her favorite poets （Heaney, Dove, and Graham）, while covering some of the same territory covered in the other two books under review, nevertheless break some new ground. Vendler has long admired Heaney’s sanity and humanity, and in her treatment of Heaney’s essays in The Government of the Tongue she brings out the clear-eyed moral integrity and perceptiveness that has always been one of Heaney’s gifts to an unsettled and histrionic cultural and political world. Likewise, although much of Vendler’s take on Graham is familiar, Vendler’s pointed contrast between Graham and Rich is perceptive. Her quarrel with Rich, while leading her to censure what seems to her to be Rich’s tendency to create morally simplistic cartoons, never leads her to resort to blanket dismissal, and she is able to step outside of her general criticism to offer homage to several moments of unashamed appreciation of natural beauty in Rich’s poems. Vendler’s essays on Graham are distinguished from her readings of this poet in other volumes by her attention to Graham’s moments of uncharacteristically simple pathos, as in her description of her Grandmother’s last days in a nursing home, “there in her diaper sitting with her purse in her hands all day.”

The range of Vendler’s interests is large. Included are reviews of recent books by established poets （Merrill, Ammons, Glück, Ashbery）, retrospectives of poets of an earlier era （such as a harshly critical review of a new edition of selected poems of Robinson Jeffers, and a thorough and thoroughly evenhanded consideration of Donald Davie’s work, on the occasion of the publication of his Collected Poems）. Vendler is always at pains to specify accurately what the ambitions are even of poets whom she finds unsympathetic. Although she is taken aback by the sense she has in Dave Smith’s poetry that in it “the page becomes something wrestled into submission, its repudiatory blankness overcome by a broad and strong calligraphy” （p. 43）, she nevertheless can be impressed by his ear for the uncanny and the grotesque. Her review of Gary Snyder’s No Nature begins by dismissing Snyder as more guru than poet, but ends by being taken by his poems anyway, and defines in his work a vision of what poetry can do which is not like anyone else’s, a poetry which “registers the passage of time with an impersonality full of wonder” （p. 122）. Although she finds Charles Simic’s view of the world nightmarishly claustrophobic and obsessive, going so far as to describe his poetry as “coercive” （p. 102）, she is also alive to the power of the unbearable tension that is his element, and takes relish in “the poems of slightly surrealist malice that still seem to me Simic’s best” （p. 107）.

Vendler’s purview is not restricted to poets of established reputations. Of August Kleinzahler, for instance, she brings out his unlikely dual affiliations with Ammons and with Stevens, and without condescension or that lowering of standards one sometimes undertakes in the name of generosity to new talents （she rather tartly rebukes his tendency to “fall over the edge into tough-guy sentimentality” （p. 154））, is able to attend to those “jaunty skips and riffs” of his that so much “solace the ear” （155）. A similar generosity sharpened with justice characterizes her review of Lucie Brock-Broido’s first book, A Hunger. After rebuking the young poet for persistent use of a few obsessive words, she nevertheless is impressed by the vigor, the “Grand Guignol relish” （p. 173） of her poetic energy, and the tartness and astringency of her take on the life of the feelings.

The two lecture-collections are each unified by a loosely constructed problem. The Given and the Made treats how four poets （Lowell, Berryman, Dove, and Graham） take up and transform the inescapable facts of their personal lives in poetry. The problem is general enough that one might use almost any poet to examine it. And yet the overarching concept seems more here to be an enabling conceit than a central occasion for criticism. Graham’s trilingual education, for example, does not appear in Vendler’s essay to be quite a “given” in the same sense that Lowell’s genealogy or Berryman’s mania and alcoholism or Dove’s race are givens. But the book does not stand or fall by this, so long as its local readings are insightful, as they are.

The Lowell chapter delineates his career in a few swift but sure strokes. She sees in the poems of Land of Unlikeness （1944） and Lord Weary’s Castle （1946） a stern but ultimately rather mechanical recipe for public lyric history—“the disaffiliated son rebuking with grim triumph his rotting ancestors” （p. 5）. But Vendler’s distaste for this early stance is not just a function of its repetitiveness but arises from a sense of its ethical as well as aesthetic failure, for Lowell’s “implacably vengeful” poems repeat the crime they rebuke, so that the narrator comes off as “a predestinarian Calvinist of the very stripe he condemns” （p. 6）. Vendler treats the stylistic crisis in Lowell’s career over the years preceding his breakthrough Life Studies （1960） as not merely a repudiation of the style he had learned from Allen Tate but also as a thorough rethinking of the kinds of things poetry can do and of the quality of judgment it should bring to historical and familial experiences. Vendler sees the poems of Life Studies as turning on apparently peripheral matters that illuminate the big issues, in the way that Freudian slips or jokes illuminate the big issues. Tonally, the fierce and judgmental style of the early poems gives way to detachment and ironic understatement, “a dryly comic sense of the disproportion between human aims and life’s events” （p. 12）.

If your family is the Lowell family, of course, an ironic family history is also an ironic public history. Lowell’s most powerful treatment of the abjectness of the present relative to the past, “For the Union Dead,” Vendler sees as treating public history with the same associative density Lowell brings to family history. Vendler argues that there is an anti-Irish edge to this poem （since the Irish have displaced the Yankees who ruled Boston in Colonel Shaw’s day）, but Lowell’s animus seems to me to be directed more generally at the savage servility of ’50s culture generally; I see nothing specifically anti-Irish in the poem, and wonder what Vendler’s starting point for this claim is. Is it just that the Aquarium whose ruin Lowell laments in the poem’s opening lines happens to be in South Boston? Vendler’s reading of Notebook 1967–8 and of its “Poundian offspring,” History, is less sympathetic: she finds the tumultuous accumulation of blank-verse sonnets thematically shapeless, organized only by an arbitrary and procrustean form. Vendler ultimately sees Lowell as winning through to a more humane skepticism in Day by Day （1977）, in which the overwhelming spew of agglutinated detail in the poetry of the 1960s gives way to a more detached and more lucid vision, unwilling to sum it all up, unclear even that it has a meaning, but able to find value and consolation in a clearsighted accuracy.

Vendler sees the form Berryman invented for The Dream Songs very differently from how she sees the blank verse sonnets through which Lowell attempted to impose order upon chaotic events. Berryman’s form is flexible enough to do justice to his irony and to his complexly shifting tone, and his use of a long series of brief anecdotal narratives, which Vendler sees as the poetic equivalent of a long series of psychoanalytic hours, seems far more congenial to her than the equivalent in Lowell. Vendler is taken by Berryman’s rhetorical energy, his endless self-satire, the glee with which he undercuts even deeply felt tragedies from his personal life: “He made, a thousand years ago, a-many songs / for an Excellent lady, wif whom he was in wuv.” She finds in Berryman’s Henry, the protagonist of The Dream Songs, “the first full-length poetic portrait of the Freudian Id—regressive, petulant, hysterical, childish, cunning, hypersexual, boastful, frightened, shameless, and revengeful; but also grieving, imaginative, hilarious, mocking, and full of Joycean music: ‘I have a sing to shay.’” （p. 40）, Vendler also sees Henry’s blackface interlocutor with considerable clarity, nothing how he is always usually able to rebuke Henry when he is furthest off base without turning into the stern and sadistic Super-ego. The interlocutor exercises precisely the kind of humane and sympathetic judgment that “confessional poetry” is supposed to be least capable of. Vendler notes, however, that neither Henry nor his blackface interlocutor speak for the narrator, who regards both figures with distance and irony, able to know them and to know himself completely, able to make poetry out of that knowledge, but unable to use that knowledge to save himself.

Vendler’s account of Rita Dove’s career thus far is an account of a poet learning to free herself from the expectations her situation might seem in the eyes of others to impose upon her and to see things her own way. She sees Dove as working both with and against the populist poetry bequeathed to her by Brooks and Hughes, and her early poetry, dominated as it were by a single identity marker, seems to Vendler to be limited and predictable. The secret to Dove’s development as a poet seems to Vendler to be her ability to take the unpredictable point of view. A case in point is her much admired poem “Parsley,” which treats the 1937 massacre of Haitian cane workers by the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Trujillo is an actual historical monster, although his trick of sorting out Dominican from Haitian on the basis of how they pronounce the word “perejil” （“parsley” in Spanish） seems something that Gabriel Garcia Marquez would invent. The moral seriousness of the poem is in Dove’s ability to enter the tormented but inventive mind of the dictator, who is no cardboard figure to Dove, although still of course a horror.

This sense of human depth particularly appeals to Vendler in her reading of Dove’s book-length poem about her grandparents’ hard lives after coming north in the great migration earlier in this century, Thomas and Beulah （1986）. Dove portrays Thomas’s frustration as a worker in an aircraft factory during the Second World War with exquisite humanity: he feels that his masculinity is in doubt because he has been rejected from serving in the Army on account of his “frailness.” Working as a riveter instead, he reflects bitterly about being given the crude job of riveting rather than the sophisticated work of engine-building, which is given instead to “women with fingers no smaller than his.” He idly considers sabotaging the wings he is assembling by giving the rivets too short a blast from his rivet gun, but it is clear that even this thought is aimless and rather sad. It’s this insight into human complexity, and insight which transcends agendas, which so attracts Vendler to Dove’s work.

The linkage between the Graham chapter and the others is less than obvious, but Vendler offers perceptive readings of difficult poems nevertheless. Vendler sees Graham as putting her life-experience in three languages to work in a habit of thought able （because it can phrase those thoughts in several alternative idioms） to see itself at a far enough distance from itself to be able to catch its thoughts in motion and observe how they move. Vendler also sees the characteristic rhythms of Graham’s poetry in English as somehow bearing the impress of the speech rhythms of Italian; here, however, she does not present enough direct evidence to make this more than a passing intuition.

These are not the main themes of her Graham chapter, however, although they are the places where that chapter intersects with the concerns of the rest of the book. Vendler here （as elsewhere—she makes the same argument about Graham in all three books, and more than once in Soul Says） is chiefly concerned with Graham as a philosophical poet, as a poet interested in the tension between high abstraction and the turbulent flow of particulars and modifying perceptions. Vendler’s Graham is a poet who sees the philosophical stakes in small acts, seizes upon those acts as occasions for poetic meditation, and, catching her thought on the fly, is able to present the thinking-through of the world in the first person way of the poet rather than in the third-person way of the philosopher. The ability to catch thought on the fly and rethink it is something Graham shares with Ashbery, of course, except that what in Ashbery is an occasion for rueful irony and self-effacement is for Graham an occasion for rapt absorption in an intense moment of perception and thought.

Vendler sees Graham as growing into a poetry of the live experience of thought out of an early procedure in which a particular event becomes an emblem to be brooded upon, followed by a flight into abstraction which may or may not resolve the issue which that event stung the poet into thinking about. She provides a particularly rich reading of “At Luca Signorelli’s Resurrection of the Body,” in which the painter, able to render the body accurately in art on account of his patient dissection of corpses, prompts the poet to think about why it is that the soul alone is not sufficient for heavenly bliss, why it is that at the last judgment the souls will all be restored to their bodies. This leads to a consideration of how Signorelli, his own son having died violently, dissected the body in a final futile act of love and knowledge Vendler is somewhat skeptical of the personal turn. Graham’s poetry took in Region of Unlikeness, but she makes a persuasive case for the meditations in The End of Beauty and Materialism, finding in her intellectual restlessness “a made art more diaphanous, more restless, and more metaphysical than any other contemporary American poetic construct” （p. 130）.

The governing notion of the other lecture collection, The Breaking of Style, is that revolution in the poet’s style is a revolution also in the poet’s psyche and in the poet’s view of the proper work of poetry. The exemplary poets in this book are Hopkins, Heaney, and Graham. Here, as in The Given and the Made, it’s not obvious that this concept made the choice of these texts inevitable—indeed, Vendler freely admits that in Heaney’s case what she is examining are local stylistic changes rather than global ones.

Vendler argues that for Hopkins, the invention of sprung rhythm—the new “body” of his poetic thought—is linked to a new sense of the possible sacredness of physical things; the metrically smoother poetry of Hopkins’s early career also was more invested in a bodiless spirituality, and the invention of sprung rhythm is a consequence or at least a concomitant of a new sense of the immanence of the divine in this world. Vendler has a penetrating sense of the poetic resources sprung rhythm made available to Hopkins, and gives a fascinating explanation of why, in certain poems after his stylistic revolution, Hopkins chose not to employ his characteristic meter. Even when she reads familiar poems, Vendler sees them shrewdly, noting how Hopkins “squeezes out” unstressed syllables so as to produce a series of syncopated shocks, underlined with syntactic compression and intensified by a spondaic crush of alliterated syllables. When Hopkins’ vision darkens, late in his career, the rhythmic assault of his verse also darkens and clots, with an “eight-beat sprung-rhythm lines prolonging themselves into one undifferentiated monosyllabic vocal disharmony” that Vendler calls “the last agony of the stylistic body of poetry” （p. 40）.

The stylistic changes Vendler notices in the poetry of Seamus Heaney are not metrical but grammatical. Others have noted the evolution of Heaney’s themes and subject matter. But Vendler notices also that at different phases of his career Heaney puts different parts of speech at the center of the poem. In his 1991 volume Seeing Things, for instance, Vendler notices that the mnemonic charging of past places and things by the events that happened there is figured in a style in which all of the verbs and adjectives become transformed into their equivalent nouns, so that the setting becomes a list of transfixing things that as it were possess the mind. By contrast, an earlier poem such as “Oysters,” from Field Work （1979）, captures the vitality and urgency of what it describes by transforming all of the other parts of speech into verbs. This world of “verb, all verb” is a world of “an immediate, sensual apprehension of life unspoiled by sexual or political second thoughts” （p. 49）. The earliest Heaney, argues Vendler, is a poet of adjectives, whose prowess in turning all parts of speech into adjectives is a way of rendering the turbidity and tactility of the natural world. It is his investment in adjectives, for instance, which imaginatively revivifies the preserved corpses of the bog people Heaney describes in North （1975）. In each case the foregrounding of a part of speech is linked to a moral insight and to an occasion for poetic self-consciousness.

The stylistic changes Vendler discusses in Graham’s poetry here concern the length of her lines. Vendler finds in the short lines of Graham’s early poems an allegiance to a somatic conception of the line: the line is a unit of breath, and writing in lines is a way of marking out poetry with the rhythms of the body. Short lines break up the world into increments, so that each piece may be examined individually and seriatim, as if picked up in tweezers. Graham’s more recent experiments in long lines treat those long lines as “the formal equivalent of mortality, dissolution, and unmeaning” （p. 78）. Because they break the relationship between line and breath, these long lines take the poem from the region of the body into the region of the mind. In postponing the end of the line they also postpone the “intellectual and formal dénoument” （p. 78） of completed statements, and since the completed statement inevitably falsifies the never completed back and forth rethinking of living intellectual experience, the long line offers to Graham a kind of poetic candor about the provisionalness of all real thinking. In Graham’s recent tendency to number her long lines, Vendler finds not a recurrence of her earlier desire to break the world up into manageable packets but rather an investment in infinitely extensible but discrete moments of gazing, so that “a trust in the vagaries of the perceptual replaces the earlier poetry’s trust both in the physiologically regulated order of breath and in a teleologically regulated order of truth” （p. 82）.

In the introduction to Soul Says Vendler describes how the lyric “I” has an identity deeper than that which is a function of its social allegiances, an identity which Vendler calls “soul.” The identity of the characters of novels is, by contrast the identity of what Vendler calls “self.” Their rich specificity requires them to be seen in the tangled network of relatedness, and for this reason readers of novels naturally （if pitiably） hold novels prisoner to identity politics. The novel reader reads with and about the self. But the lyric speaker, and, Vendler argues, the lyric reader, is, like Whitman’s “Me myself,” not totally the creature of the powerful accidents which specify one’s time, place, culture, class, gender, or race. “These come to me days and nights and go from me again,” Whitman concedes, “But they are not the Me myself.” What Whitman calls the “Me myself” Vendler calls the Soul. It is an inwardness which does not lack specifications, but it is not netted in by them. Even when we read lyrics silently, we hear them spoken in our own voices. That’s how, Vendler says, soul speaks to soul.