SOURCE: “Reviewing Contemporary Poetry: Helen Vendler and the Aesthetic Method,” in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 31, No. 2, Summer, 1990, pp. 240-50.

Seasoned reviewers of contemporary poetry are durable reviewers. Seduced by their passion for new poems, yet driven by their devotion to establishing context and tradition, they speak to their audience, when they speak most forcefully, with the inspired tones of advocacy, and as advocates, they quickly learn that those who differ with them often desert the genteel grounds of tacit disagreement to become articulate opponents. They are not the only practitioners of the literary arts who suffer disfavor, but they belong to the scrappy gang of critics who must contend with the peculiar difficulties of assessing the work of a living author: the evidence for their opinions borrows little authority from an existing critical corpus, nor can it gain such authority by correcting a dominant interpretive scheme. Part of their job, and part of their attraction to the job, involves the intoxicating task of establishing these traditions. Contemporary poets have contemporary friends, too, and although reviewers ideally elevate their judgments above the vagaries of the coterie, they continually confront the noisy partisanship that unavoidably attends the making of a literary reputation. The reviewer’s spiritual home is Grub Street, and a continued residence there requires endurance and commitment.

Helen Vendler has been reviewing contemporary poetry since 1967, when an omnibus piece appeared in The Massachusetts Review, and her opinions, collected in 1980 under the title Part of Nature, Part of Us, have been brought up to date eight years later with the publication of The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics. The two volumes comprise sixty-four essays—over three completed a year—and these, combined with her scholarly articles, her five books of criticism, and her two anthologies of poetry, amount to a sizable bulk of material. For two decades, she has been very busy, and as often happens whenever the complete works of a substantial writer are catalogued, the catalogue is unexpectedly long. For most writers—there are luminous exceptions—accomplishment in the literary arts is accompanied by an unceasing industry in the literary arts.

Quantity, happily, does not guarantee accomplishment, particularly in the reviewer’s trade, where the embarrassing history of voluminous and mistaken opinion tempers the swaggering judgments of any era. Vendler’s range in contemporary poetry is wide, and literary statistics alone indicate that many of the poets she praises will not continue to receive such laurels. All regular reviewers face this problem. Randall Jarrell, writing in The Yale Review in 1955, sourly claimed that the critic who “likes a great many contemporary poets … is, necessarily, a bad critic,” yet his sourness occasionally afflicts every toiler in the vineyard. Perhaps the bestowal of laurels, particularly in the matter of contemporary verse, is not ultimately the reviewer’s task: sensitive to changes in style and subject matter, but immune to the illusion of instability that these changes often promote, reviewers operate in cramped quarters, often no more than a column or two, and the most successful of them cultivate the voice of the engaged, persuaded reader. Vendler’s assessment of Jarrell’s abilities in this area summarizes one of her own strengths: “But generally he incarnates his own definition of a critic in his first book of criticism, Poetry and the Age （1953）, as ‘an extremely good reader—one who has learned to show to others what he saw in what he read.’”¹ With unflagging energy, she has shown us what she saw, and that is one of the unacknowledged virtues of the busy reviewer, particularly during a time when, as Donald Hall has assured us in a recent issue of Harper’s, poets and readers of poetry abound from coast to coast.

What Vendler has chosen to see will not please everyone, nor should it, but displeasure in a reviewer’s specific choices is often allayed by an analysis of the reviewer’s range. Readers who have a penchant for formalist poetry, specifically that, say, of Richard Wilbur, might turn to Vendler’s writing for an opinion, and although they would find nothing on Wilbur, they would find other formalist poets systematically treated—Auden, Merrill, and Nemerov, to name three. None of these poets will substitute for Wilbur, and if Wilbur’s reception is the sine qua non for a reader’s evaluation of a critic, then Vendler will not fill the bill. But there are other things to learn. Similar test cases for similar styles and schools would yield similar results. Deprived of the fantasized reviewer who confirms, poet by poet, every reader’s opinion, readers must settle for the next best thing, a reviewer who can accurately isolate the diverse strengths and distinctive intonations of the many poetries that vie to crowd the anthologies. One of the clearest records of a reviewer’s diversity lies in the table of contents, and Vendler’s appreciations, when coupled, reveal a gymnastic sensibility: Robert Penn Warren and James Merrill; Randall Jarrell and W. H. Auden; Howard Nemerov and Frank O’Hara; John Berryman and Amy Clampitt. To praise these eight poets, to attempt an understanding of their accomplishments, requires the reviewer to be receptive to jarringly different poetic styles, and this adventurousness abounds in Vendler’s reviewing.

The critic’s book-length examination of a literary methodology will always embarrass the reviewer’s necessary confidence in the unexamined evaluative criterion. Vendler is keenly aware of this problem. Reviewing collections of critical prose by Robert von Hallberg, Robert Hass, and Dave Smith, she expresses hesitations about each writer’s willingness to found an ars poetica on silent assumptions. Near the beginning of the piece—entitled “Looking for Poetry in America” and positioned second in The Music of What Happens—Vendler pauses and sounds the note that most distinguishes this collection from her earlier one, Part of Nature, Part of Us:

And I do know the impossibility of a return to first principles before each sentence one commits to paper. However, we have all recently been put on notice, by the salutary sternness of literary theory, that our terms are likely to be interrogated, and that we might first interrogate them ourselves. And though nobody likes to be reminded of this obligation, I take the reviewer’s—and fellow practitioner’s—privilege to make the reminder, as much to myself as to the writers under review.

（25）

Published in 1980, Part of Nature, Part of Us appeared in the same year as Frank Lentricchia’s After the New Criticism, one of the widely read treatises that analyzed the period from 1960 to 1980 as one of “the richest and most confusing in our critical history.”² Partly as a result of Lentricchia’s work, these richnesses and confusions—handily organized now, and given something resembling a common parlance—visited most everyone concerned with the literary arts, and their “salutary sternness” was variously received. In The Music of What Happens, Vendler has responded to the transformed critical climate with a succinct introduction and an expansive initial essay, providing the self-interrogation that she had prescribed for von Hallberg, Hass, and Smith. Absent from the first collection, this prolegomenon provides her readers the material to evaluate her orientation as a reviewer and a critic. It is a vital addition to American letters because it confronts the seismic shifts that have occurred in literary criticism over the past three decades from the perspective of the reviewer, perhaps the last employee in the literary marketplace who unashamedly labors to make qualitative pronouncements about the work at hand.

Her introduction begins incisively:

In a 1986 essay in Raritan, W. J. T. Mitchell, who edits Critical Inquiry, called the present tendency in criticism “a shift in emphasis from meaning to value,” explaining meaning-centered criticisms as those interested in “interpretations,” and value-centered criticisms as those “focussing on the problems of belief, interest, power, and ideology.” As master-terms of criticism, meaning and value （in Mitchell’s sense） may seem important to others: to me they seem marginal.

（1）

What is important to Vendler, even when dealing with historical texts, is the question of “aesthetic success,” the other interests of interpretation or power being useful inasmuch as they specifically locate the work within the originating culture. The methodology defended here, as well as the characteristic terminology, will seem breathlessly antiquated to many contemporary critics and theorists, but to the reviewer of contemporary poetry, whose judgments are validated more often by the strength and spontaneity of the personal response than by the manipulation of a critical tradition, aesthetic practice is inevitable. The reviewer or critic in Vendler’s scheme, after all of the appropriate sleuthing for meaning and ideology is done, must make a further judgment, one that reveals the hierarchy of Vendler’s literary values: “The critic may well begin, ‘Look at it this way for a change,’ but the sentence must continue, ‘and now don’t you see it as more intelligibly beautiful and moving?’” （2）.

Vendler’s readings are continually directed, as the simple comparative “more” indicates, toward excavating the poem’s aesthetic totality, and although many contemporary theorists will find her totalizing schemes as fantastically oriented as the poems she treats, her insistence on the aesthetic perspective does more than mark her as an occasional aestheticist; her criticism, its stylistic vigor often reminiscent of the lively eighteenth-century judgment, cultivates an essentially public rhetoric, attempting as a result what Frank Kermode in The Appetite for Poetry （1989） has recently called “the reconstitution of the Common Reader.” The extensive reordering of critical agendas that has characterized the last several decades of literary study has done much to alter our notions of the reading process and its influence on the most fundamental evaluation of culture, and Vendler’s unstinting attention to contemporary verse implicitly defends, perhaps even privileges, its place in this ongoing process of reconstitution. For that alone, she deserves unwithered garlands.

Her aesthetic method naturally entails advocacy, a measured plea designed to convince the reader of the work’s reigning integrity. Vendler carefully specifies the intention of such criticism, and because the operative literary values—often discussed at length in longer works—are succinctly embedded, according to Vendler, in the prose style of the criticism, it is well suited to the reviewer’s need for efficiency and abbreviation. More on this later. “The aim of an aesthetic criticism,” Vendler states, “is to describe the art work in such a way that it cannot be confused with any other art work （not an easy task）, and to infer from its elements the aesthetic that might generate this unique configuration” （2）. Description—not analysis, not structuring, not interpretation—is the definitive technique of the aesthetic critic or reviewer, and it engenders its appropriate vision of the sociopolitical aspect of lyric poetry: “It may be,” Vendler contends, “that discursive ‘speaking of’ is not lyric’s way of embodying social realities. ‘In truth,’ said Yeats, ‘we have no gift to set a statesman right’—but he did not mean by that, as his work shows, that one could not embody political and cultural realities in verse” （34）. The descriptive technique, then, might reveal, where ideological analysis would not, the lyric’s generically specific form of political or social representation, and it enables reviewers to deploy lines of inquiry traditionally reserved for more detailed treatments of special interest.

Aesthetic description is unabashedly derived from the initial pleasure or delight experienced by the reviewer upon first encountering the work, and reviewers of contemporary poetry, whether confessing to it or not, rely most on these qualities as the substructure for their specific appraisals. “Pleasure,” as Auden wrote, “is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible,”³ and pleasure is one of Vendler’s pivotal concerns—the term appears twenty-three times in her twelve-page essay “The Function of Criticism.” Because it is so intimately connected with the description of artistic form, Vendler’s work provides a cogent example of how various formal pleasures are integrated in the aesthetic model to provide a way of reading and writing innately suited to the reviewer of contemporary poetry.

It should not be surprising, then, that Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory （unfinished at his death） has influenced Vendler’s methodology: the work offers one of the fullest expositions of the ways in which aesthetic form, when properly understood, maintains its particular social dimension, the ways in which, to use Kermode’s phrase, it cultivates the Common Reader. This concern is so fundamental to the reviewer’s work that it most often goes unquestioned; the reviewer who recommends a book of poetry argues implicitly that interested readers might derive pleasure from reading the book of poetry, and to envision a pleasured readership, as most reviewers of contemporary poetry do, is to accommodate traditional ideas concerning the social value of art. In this sense, Vendler’s work as a reviewer is a field trial for Adorno’s work as a theorist—he is mentioned three times in her latest collection.

In her introduction, Vendler describes the nature of Adorno’s importance for our century: “The twentieth-century critic most faithful to art’s two sides—its originating propositions and beliefs and its necessary subordination of these to intrinsic efforts of form—is Theodor Adorno” （5）. According to Vendler, there are two rules of thumb that govern aesthetic description—and presumably her own work—and both of them play an important role in Adorno’s own sense of artistic form. The first, that “no significant component can be left out of consideration” （3）, is implied by Adorno’s discussion of form and content: “Aesthetic form ought to be the objective organization of all that appears in a work of art. … Form is a non-repressive synthesis of diffuse particulars.” Aesthetic description, then, will render visible as many of these “diffuse particulars” as possible. And Vendler’s second requirement, that “the significant components are known as such by interacting with each other in a way that seems coherent, not haphazard” （3）, is related to Adorno’s concept of artistic unity: “Unity is brittle and insubstantial if the forms and moments of works consist simply of topoi rather than emerging directly from the individual work.”⁴ The salient moments of a work, then, resist the predetermined meanings of topoi and obtain their significance by “interacting with each other,” to use Vendler’s words, or by “emerging directly from the individual work,” to use Adorno’s. Vendler’s criticism, like Adorno’s speculation, has no intention of superseding what is often disparagingly labeled nowadays as literary formalism.

These two concerns, intimately linked to the aesthetic tradition, naturally govern Vendler’s judgments of the critics and poets whom she discusses. Lionel Trilling, Harold Bloom, and Geoffrey Hartman occupy her attention in the present collection, and her sanctions and praises conform to her enunciated values. Trilling’s well-known essay on the “Intimations Ode,” for example, errs by exclusion, breaking Vendler’s first rule of thumb: “Because Trilling chooses not to mention the intensely ‘naturalistic’ language of socialization in stanza 7 and in the close of stanza 8, he can represent the language of the first ‘answer’ as ‘strikingly supernatural’; because he omits all mention of the race, the palms, the children on the shore of the immortal sea, and the faith that looks through death in stanzas 9–11, he can represent the language of the second ‘answer’ as ‘entirely naturalistic’” （105）. Vendler has always been counted one of Bloom’s discerning readers, and her few hesitations concern his tendency to read poems as analogues of other poems, thereby causing him to neglect “to remind us how different each great work of art is from any other one” （55）—a betrayal of her second rule of thumb where the “significant components” of a work are known not by their interaction with other works, but by their “interacting with each other.” And the critical act, according to Vendler, is analogous to the musical performance where “all sorts of ‘interpretations’ of a sonata are possible … but unless the interpretation accurately reveals a newly perceived coherence of structure … it can make no cognitive or emotional claim to replace an older interpretation” （2）. Again essentially an aesthetic claim, it emphasizes the discovery of new symphonic coherences within the work of art—related to Adorno’s notion of art’s “immanent dynamic in opposition to society”—and so Hartman is praised for being a critic “as a pianist or a conductor is an interpreter, holding up the work in a new and coherent manifestation” （48）. Vendler has taken the opportunity in this collection to examine her own predilections, and her application of them proves remarkably consistent.

Like all regular reviewers of contemporary verse, Vendler explicates the work of the poets she values with a partisan zeal; only rarely does she take up the poison pen. Lowell and Stevens sustained her attention longer than any of the other poets in the first collection, and although the number of poets discussed in her second collection has been pared down, many reappear, marking an enduring interest: A. R. Ammons, Frank Bidart, Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, James Merrill, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Dave Smith, Wallace Stevens, and Charles Wright. Making their first appearances in the new collection are John Ashbery, Michael Blumenthal, Amy Clampitt, Donald Davie, Rita Dove, Stephen Dunn, Jorie Graham, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Brad Leithauser, Czeslaw Milosz, Anne Sexton, and Stephen Spender. Talents have appeared or survived, and interests have been cultivated.

An unlikely rubric, that of prose style, provides the context for understanding Vendler’s judgments of these talents. Reviewers, as we saw earlier in Vendler’s scheme, depend upon the latent intentionality of their prose style to clarify the theoretical assumptions that, if explicated in their discussion, would consume the lion’s share of their column. This is an inherently formalist maneuver; true to her aesthetic orientation, Vendler argues in “The Function of Criticism” that “just as there may be many motives for entering a single profession—medicine, for instance—so too there are many motives for the writing of criticism, and I want to suggest that it is chiefly by its style that we know the motives and the aims of a given piece of criticism” （12）. Although Matthew Arnold would seem in some ways an unlikely ally, Vendler correctly comments, with supporting examples, that he clearly knew that “the conduct of any critical argument is evinced as much by its tone as by its premises” （25）. All readers make such judgments—often unknowingly—about a writer’s prose, but few writers indicate that in the matter of stylistic lies the matter of their motivation. This is an essential point to bear in mind when considering Vendler’s opinions of contemporary poetry because her opinions are often reflected by the stylistic features of her prose.

But stylistic analysis, when it rises above the level of parsing, is an inexact, affective analysis, and analysts proceed warily, creating their own terminology as they go. How would we characterize the following passage, where Vendler is writing about Elizabeth Bishop’s three prose poems spoken by a giant toad, a strayed crab, and a giant snail? “It is Bishop’s opalescent ribbon or glazed shell [from the snail’s monologue] left behind that we find in the Complete Poems （1983）—or so we might say if this were her only metaphor for verse. But, remembering the toad, its sacs of poison, and its shuddering pigments （Keats’s ‘chameleon poet’ metamorphosed）, we must not take too simple a view of her achievement” （285）. Vendler had previously excerpted several sentences from each monologue, and her incorporation of Bishop’s metaphors for poetry into her own reflexive analysis of Bishop’s metaphors for poetry represents one of her most common ploys. In the subsequent passage, Vendler begins to assign value to each of the three creatures, and although this essentially represents a moment of interpretation—not Vendler’s dominant interest—the interpretive language is subsumed by the metaphorical figure that initiates the argument. This is essentially a stylistic manifestation of the aesthetic dictum that the criticism of art must find ways to remain faithful to the originating propositions of artistic form: “Aesthetics is not something above and beyond art,” Adorno writes; “it has to retrace the dynamic laws of art of which the works themselves are completely unaware.”⁵ Allowing the poem at hand to set the critical vocabulary, Vendler is open to the charge, or compliment, of a rhapsodic prose. The method conforms, though, with her announced intentions, and by mimicking in her prose several of the compositional techniques of the poet, she swiftly familiarizes her reader with a few of the conceptual tacks that direct the poetry at hand. Such compression is not only born of the characteristic restrictions that often confront the reviewer, but is also part of the common ground of those readers, reviewers, and critics who have been naturalized within the domain of aesthetic practice.

Vendler’s description of Ted Hughes’s River （1984） represents another of her most typical methods of reading: it embodies her notion of artistic unity but ultimately concerns the specific sorts of unity available to the lyric poem. She is discussing Hughes’s well-known passion for finding in the natural world the imageries of violence, horror, and predation that are then transformed into the language of his own private violence, horror, and predation:

Hughes has gone about the world finding vessels in nature for his private horrors; once the poison is emptied into the natural vessel and the poem has fixed it there, the horror has changed places—of course, only for a moment. For the spell to work, the poem has to be adequate to its object, one presumes; but, even so, the aesthetic end is subordinated to the therapeutic one. These priorities need to be reversed if the poems are to bear the strain well and long.

（206）

More care must ultimately be given by the poet, Vendler implies, to the object described in the poem than to the therapeutic effect of having described it. Or at least that must be the illusion that governs the poem. Aside from offering her quiet comment on the dangers of poetic confession, Vendler also speaks here to the notion, expressed in the beginning of her essay on Rich, that “poetry, if it is good poetry, remains interesting after the topical issues it has engaged are dead letters” （368）. For Vendler, the element of interest remains the aesthetic accomplishment of the poem, the only element that will “bear the strain” of shifting topics and changing readerships, and, for the reviewer, continually exposed to the topical interests that surround contemporary writing, this aesthetic scrutiny helps to stymie the lobbied evaluation.

Part of Vendler’s stylistic spectrum gleams with the language of advocacy, and although this does not concern aesthetic description per se, it does reveal something more about her own self-perception as a reviewer of contemporary poetry. Her adverse criticism of a poet, whenever it is offered, is most often couched within the larger context of approbation, because she is, as Jarrell on occasion was not, a reviewer of beneficent intention who would agree with Auden that “one cannot review a bad book without showing off.”⁶ Her advocacy often takes the form of a prose homage to the poet’s own poetic style. In the following passage, she is describing the importance of frescoes in Charles Wright’s “Journal from the Year of the Ox,” a poem from Zone Journals; those who know Wright’s most recent work will recognize its momentary influence on Vendler’s prose, particularly the way in which her parenthetical intrusions qualify through an act of specification, a function often served by Wright’s own serpentine and interrupting clauses:

Wright’s question suggests that the extent to which such a fresco represents our lives, or is an analogy to them, is an earnest of what the fully rich life of consciousness can be, how it can place the “real” （the duke’s daily round） in the light of cosmic orderly change （the zodiac） and suffuse it with the light of human motives idealized （Love, Wisdom, Art, Commerce）.

（395）

This is not the clinically dissecting prose of William Empson, nor is it the learned palaver of Frank Kermode; it is not suited for prosodic analysis, nor would it be able to sustain the polemics of indictment. An imitative affection for the poetry infuses the prose, and in this sense, it is a pure example of homage.

When the objects of her homage—her personal choices—have been disparaged, Vendler has most often been accused of lacking taste, traditionally the last and weakest redoubt of aesthetic debate. But none of her accusers have yet proved themselves willing or able to trace the elusive, often deeply programmatic contexts that have ushered the term into the late twentieth century and defined its amorphous field of operation. Besides, it is difficult to bring such charges against a critic who has so far written book-length treatments of W. B. Yeats, George Herbert, Wallace Stevens, and John Keats and supplemented these with an unceasing stream of essays that cover a broad spectrum of contemporary verse. After all, to speak for the improper reader is no more the reviewer’s fear than it is to praise the right authors for the wrong reasons.

Adorno has argued that “taste carries with it a subjective bias that has to be reflected upon by aesthetics,”⁷ and one of the best ways for reviewers to monitor these subjective biases is by continually attempting to read and understand a measure of those poets who seem to challenge the reviewers’ assumptions. The practice is certainly informed by the anxiety of missing the Emily Dickinson of our day, but it seems innately suited to reviewing American poetry as well. “The first thing that strikes a reader about the best American poets,” Auden observed, “is how utterly unlike each other they are,”⁸ and if this is so, then the method of aesthetic description, bent on locating the myriad of formal integrities that populate our literature, provides the reviewer an effective technique for responding to our national diversity. Reviewers need not value this wide gamut when it comes to contemporary poetry, but those who work regularly have certainly confronted it. Contemporary poetry is always undergoing a transformation of style, subject matter, and technique, and the genuinely transformed poems will be first recognized by those from the reviewer’s quarter, at least, who privilege the diversity and vigorous individuality that transformation bestows. These reviewers—there are other breeds with other proficiencies—will descend from the aesthetic tradition to which Vendler belongs.

Notes

1. Helen Vendler, Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets （Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980） 115.

2. Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism （Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980） XI.

3. W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand, and Other Essays （1962; New York: Vintage, 1968） 5.

4. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann （Boston: Routledge, 1984） 207, 266.

5. Adorno 186.

6. Auden 11.

7. Adorno 458.

8. Auden 366.