[In the following review of The Breaking of Style and The Given and the Made,Scott commends Vendler's moderate conservatism, but finds shortcomings in her effort to “quarantine” the form and aesthetics of poetry from the cultural realities of sexuality, politics, and history.]

In a recent survey of the current poetry scene, The New York Times Magazine called Helen Vendler a critical “gatekeeper of the poetic establishment,” defending the American Parnassus from the Spoken Word barbarians of MTV and the Nuyorican Poets’ Cafe. Aside from the irony of the Times taking the name of the Establishment in vain, the article was principally interesting as evidence of a persistent tendency to view the literary landscape as an ideological battleground. The supposed stand-off between the pierced and tattooed champions of the Poetry Slam and the sherry-sipping members of the Academy of American Poets can’t help but call to mind recent skirmishes in the academy between the forces of novelty （in the shape of feminism, multiculturalism, queer theory, cultural studies and so on） and the forces of tradition （the variously stolid and rabid defenders of the canon）. Tempting as such Manichean allegories may be, they inevitably oversimplify what happens in the rag and bone shop of culture where poems are written, read and judged. The Times’s depiction of Helen Vendler was thus somewhat unfair. While there is no doubt that Vendler—the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard, a past president of the M.L.A. and a poetry reviewer for The New Yorker—wields considerable influence, her judgments have always seemed more expressions of readerly passion than pronouncements of institutional power. And though she is by taste, temperament and method conservative, she can hardly be called reactionary.

The lectures that make up The Breaking of Style and The Given and the Made address, among other matters, male homoerotic desire, racial identity and the female body. But while the very mention of such things may cause complaint on the academic right, those who believe that race, gender, sexuality and the body are the primary concerns of literary criticism will surely feel that Vendler does not pursue them far enough. It is true that she promotes work she believes to be in the mainstream of the poetic tradition in English （represented by Herbert, Keats and Stevens, each the subject of one of her many books）. Her view of that tradition, however, is neither dogmatic nor exclusive; she has acknowledged the merits, over the years, of poets from Eliot to Ginsberg to Glück. There are grounds to quarrel with her judgments, and reasons not to rest content with some of her guiding assumptions, but Vendler is a critic readers of poetry, inside the academy and out, should take seriously.

Vendler holds to the old-fashioned, fundamentally democratic belief that the job of a critic is to help readers understand and better appreciate poems. She writes less as a scholar （though her learning is prodigious） than as one impelled by the special pleasures she finds in poems to trace each instance of that pleasure to its source. A sentence from the final pages of The Breaking of Style might serve as her statement of principles: “It is because I am struck, always, by a naive wonder at the convincingness of a poem that I feel driven to ask how that memorable persuasive power has been gained.” These two books, made up of seven essays on six poets, give us the results of this questioning. While they offer complex, sometimes difficult interpretations of work that is itself often difficult, they hew close to the primary experiences of wonder and conviction it is poetry’s special power to evoke. Her prose is, for the most part, lucid and elegant, though occasionally it veers toward the impenetrable （“Hopkins’ shocks are those of an assaultive inscape—almost always a contrastive inscape of twoness—which provokes a resultant affective instress”） or the gnomic （“The nature of adjectival poems is to be radial”）.

The Breaking of Style, which considers Gerard Manley Hopkins’s metrical innovations, Seamus Heaney’s grammatical rigor and the long, Whitmanian lines and numbered sections of Jorie Graham’s recent poetry, is the more technical of the books; its subject is how individual poets invent a new “material body,” or style, for their poems. The chapter on Hopkins is a tour de force, the most concise and helpful account I have seen of the dense, jarring, strangely musical meter the Victorian Jesuit called “sprung rhythm.” Vendler brilliantly associates the body of Hopkins’s style, in its twisting agony and its proportioned beauty, with his poetry’s furtive and adoring glances at other, mostly male, bodies, both human and divine. Impressive as this chapter is, though, it’s also frustrating: I found myself wanting the overlap between style and sexuality pressed further, given a context. The intersection of aesthetics, sexuality and religion, especially in the nineteenth century, has after all been the subject of much valuable recent historical and literary scholarship: It is intriguing, for example, to think about how Vendler might read Hopkins, a scholar of classics at Oxford, in connection with Linda Dowling’s recent Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford, or Eve Sedgwick’s already classic Epistemology of the Closet. Some sign of engagement with this kind of scholarship—even a footnote or two—would not detract from Vendler’s close readings but would rather enrich them.

I don’t mean to suggest that Vendler is squeamish about the sexual content of Hopkins’s poems; what makes her uncomfortable is content itself. In the introduction to The Breaking of Style she expresses frustration at how seldom “contemporary interpretations of poetry … deduce [the] human import” of things like “prosody, grammar, and lineation.” By itself, the book might plausibly stand as a corrective dose of formalism in an age of message-hunting and cultural generalization. So what if sex, religion, politics, history and personal identity are treated as secondary to spondees, adjectives and enjambments? There is much to be gained from thinking about how poems are made as well as about what they say. We might even accept the general truth of what Vendler concludes about Heaney’s poems, namely that the “genetic code” of form gives them “their urgency as worked art, without which their urgency as message would falter.” Such formalism is defensible as a critical procedure, and it works reasonably well in The Breaking of Style. But in The Given and the Made, the more ambitious （and more accessible） of these books, Vendler’s emphasis on worked art produces critical messages that are decidedly mixed.

Her topic is how four recent American poets—Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Rita Dove and, once again, Jorie Graham—transform the determining facts of their lives into poetry, and so “[make] out of the problematic, the aesthetic.” Each of these poets faces what Vendler calls an “inescapable donnée”: for Lowell, the intertwined histories of family and nation; for Berryman, the monstrous alcoholic id; for Dove, the fact of her race; and for Graham, her trilingual upbringing. To treat these matters—all of them serious, all of them apt matters for poetry—as equivalent requires abstracting them from history, and this is what Vendler does. While she grants that “paying attention to poetic strategies necessarily entails awareness of the existential possibilities available at a given historical moment,” her discussion of these possibilities is somewhat restricted and inert. She has little to say, for example, on the subject of gender, claiming in the introduction that “the gender divide between generations … is itself unimportant, but perhaps of historical interest.”

But part of that history is the history of literary ambition in America, a history that materially affects the shaping of poems. Lowell and Berryman, that is, were not just white men, but white men who dreamed, from the dawn of their careers, of being Dead White Men, of laying claim to the laurels of Homer, Milton and Yeats. Dove, in contrast, who has just completed her term as the first African-American Poet Laureate of the United States, has written movingly of her feeling, as a young girl, that the enchanted garden of literature was off-limits to people of her color and gender. This is not to say that Dove’s poems about her grandparents in the extraordinary book Thomas and Beulah are therefore better than Lowell’s poems about his in Life Studies, but rather to suggest that the differences between them matter both to history and to poetry.

Vendler’s argument, in The Given and the Made, is that poetry is a special way of confronting, and symbolically resolving, the hard facts of life. And poetry, which has for so long seemed to be approaching an ultimate marginality, surely needs defenders like Vendler, so committed to protecting its singularity as an art form. But I am not sure it needs to be quarantined, to be protected from the incursions of politics and sexuality or from the extrapoetic implications of a poet like Graham’s relentless questioning of what it is to have a body, to be a person. While it is silly to insist, in a narrowly ideological way, that poems must be political, it seems to me equally questionable to imply that they are better when they avoid, or transcend, the political altogether. The argument of so much poetry in our time is that there is no such transcendence: “The poem,” wrote Vendler’s cherished Wallace Stevens in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” “is the cry of its occasion. / Part of the res itself and not about it.” Poetry is part of the world, and thinking about poems is a way of thinking about the world.

And I don’t think Helen Vendler disagrees. It may just be that my way of thinking about the world, and of thinking about it through poems, always leads me back, however reluctantly, to questions of politics. I find it most useful, therefore, to read these illuminating books somewhat against the grain. In the very title The Given and the Made, after all, we can hear an echo of the definitively political desire to wrest freedom from the prosaic world of necessity. In attending to what Charles Olson called “the will to change” as it manifests itself in poems, we might learn about more than just poetry.