“I spent a good part of my 15th year puzzling over drafts of poems by Dylan Thomas… often copying out each successive draft myself… trying to deduce... the reason for revisions in sound”. So wrote Helen Vendler in her late 80s, looking back on a career of single-minded devotion to poetry. Harvard professor and friend of Seamus Heaney, Vendler was her era’s most deeply knowledgeable poetry scholar. She was also a profound, close reader of WB Yeats, who shaped her responses to all the other poets she studied.
Vendler cast her searching eye on individual poems by great poets in the final work of her life, Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays. Yeats weaves in and out of many of these, often to the disadvantage of the essay’s target poet.
Giving him pride of place, Vendler begins the book with an exploration of The Second Coming. She points out, importantly, the passive verbs in the poem’s famous opening lines: who is “loosing” anarchy, who is “loosing” the tide, who is drowning innocence? She notes how “the couplets begin to disintegrate… demonstrating how ‘things fall apart’”, and contrasts the “omniscience” of the poem’s first part with the uncertainty of its end. Yeats “confesses the helplessness of the human intellect... At the inexorable approach of an unknowable, shapeless, coarse and destructive era, ‘the darkness drops again’”.
Vendler’s close reading has more in common with forensic analysis at a blood lab than academia. “What was the work the poet was demanding of me?” she asks. “It was to inhabit the poem, to live willingly in its world”. For a Wallace Stevens poem, “I understood that I had to take the bird literally…I became his ornithologist, recording the bird’s traits, his present and past habitats…”
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For a scholar who parsed some of poetry’s most ambiguous lines, Vendler is refreshingly unambiguous: in an essay about John Donne, she flat-out calls Yeats “the finest poet of the 20th century”. She then shapes her analysis of Holy Sonnet 14 around Yeats’s theory of moods. Yeats led Vendler to, and back from, other poets: before her doctoral programme, she knew “I wanted to write a dissertation on WB Yeats, but I knew that I had first to understand Blake”. In discussing Yeats’s lines, “I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,/ I sought it daily for six weeks or so”, Vendler notes parenthetically, “Mention of that poem in his letters of the time prove this no exaggeration: I counted the weeks”.
[ Helen Vendler on meeting Seamus HeaneyOpens in new window ]
Vendler sometimes jumps to unpersuasive conclusions based – charmingly – on her wish to identify with the poet’s life, as when she says unspecified characters in an Adrienne Rich poem must be the speaker’s parents. Even Vendler’s flaws are based on her deep desire to inhabit the poet’s mind.
Vendler had dozens of world-class poets – American, Irish and English – to choose from when deciding on superlatives. She pays due homage to them in these essays, but it was Yeats who held her fast. Yeats is the standard against which everything else is measured.
Despite her ivory-tower credentials, Vendler never got bogged down in academic puzzles or trivia. She always went back to the music on the page. In Last Essays, she rendered her final judgment for readers of poetry in English. The 20th century’s greatest poetry critic looked (carefully, carefully, carefully) at the greatest poets of that century, and chose Yeats.
Laura Sheahen is an American poet who spends part of her time in Tunisia.
