Transfusions of Melody, Infusions of Light
Helen Vendler, Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays
Library of America, 290pp, £22.99, ISBN 9781598538274
reviewed by Bret van den Brink
Helen Vendler’s Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays is an eloquent, humane work of criticism, which displays her typical sensitivity to what Wordsworth called the ‘turnings intricate of verse’. I must admit, I am not an unbiased reviewer. Having been born several decades after Vendler, I came to her work rather late. She, in my (inaccurate) imagination, had always been the empress of poetic criticism, duly enthroned at Harvard. Though some of her early works received severe criticism, Gordon Teskey is scarcely hyperbolic when he writes, ‘Helen’s major books have all become classics’. I know that I am not alone in confessing that I will never be able to read lyrics by Shakespeare, Herbert, Keats, Dickinson, Yeats, Stevens, or a plethora of other poets, as I once had before reading Vendler’s magisterial writings on them.
Indeed, the most familiar of poems become rich and strange as Vendler turns her attention to them. ‘It Must Change’, so Stevens titled the second section of Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction, where he writes, ‘The freshness of transformation is / The freshness of a world. It is our own, / It is ourselves, the freshness of ourselves’. Freshness is the precise word for the feeling I get from Vendler’s work. ‘Nature is never spent’, Hopkins writes, ‘There lives the dearest freshness deep down things’; poetry is never spent either. The first essay of Inhabit the Poem, ‘Loosed Quotes’, offers a stunning re-reading of William Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’. It is scarcely conceivable that the film of familiarity should have grown over so astonishing a poem, and yet it has. It has fallen prey, Vendler tells us, to the ‘[j]ournalists and critics’ who take the statements from its opening octave ‘as final assertions of Yeats’s own beliefs’. It has become the ‘Loosed Quotes’ of Vendler’s title, and Yeats is made into ‘a pundit’. I myself was guilty, when I read the poem in an airport before Vendler’s essay, of tweeting the lines:
In Vendler’s sinewy reading, the second stanza of the poem traces Yeats’s ‘turn away from his initial confident (and baseless) soothsaying to a personal, transitory (and therefore uncertain), private “revelation,’’ motivated by a ‘desire for authentically human speech’. Poignantly and rightly, Vendler laments both the reductive image of Yeats in the popular imagination, determined as it is by the ‘loosed quotes’ of the poem’s opening, along with the still more terrible loss of the poem’s ‘human drama’.
Vendler’s second essay, ‘The Enigmatical Beauty of Each Beautiful Enigma’, is scarcely less rich than her first; reading it, I am reminded of Harold Bloom’s review of her 1969 study On Extended Wings, where he declares her ‘a commentator almost clairvoyant’. In this brief essay, many of the difficulties of Stevens’s ‘The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws’ melt beneath her touch, especially as she draws upon the biographical details of Stevens’s challenging marriage to explicate the poem. The titular bird turns out to be a self-portrait of its author. Stevens himself is ‘the blind starving bird in a charnel house of former selves who nonetheless has not lost his brooding spirit’. Or, if it is not exactly a self-portrait, the poem nevertheless captures a moment or a mood from Stevens’s life and ‘transfuses’ this moment or mood, this ‘living state’ into the reader. Confronted by this bewildering poem, Vendler asks, ‘What was the work that the poet was demanding of me?’ and her glorious answer is, ‘[T]o inhabit the poem, to live willingly in its world.’
Her dedication to inhabiting the poems she discusses ensures that Vendler never fails to illuminate them, even when I am not fully convinced by the key thrusts of her argument, such as her contention that John Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnet 14’ is not a prayer. Whatever its shortcomings, the chapter opens with an invaluable Yeatsian meditation of what a lyric poem is and does — ‘a lyric poem is a simulacrum of a succession of human moods, conducting us through their rapid transitions and self-contradictions’ — and, with this definition in place, she seeks to recover the human impact of Donne’s sonnet even in the aftermath of the so-called Death of God. Having traced the poem’s unique succession of moods, Vendler revels in how it imparts to the reader ‘the vivid sensation that God will not refuse salvation, but will, by a steady infusion of light, transform spiritual passivity into a cherished mutuality of enthralled self and ravished soul.’
The 13th, concluding essay of the book, ‘Can Poetry Be Abstract?’, opens with Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson, before expanding with a centrifugal energy to include Coleridge, Keats, Hardy, Eliot, Ashberry, as well as reprisals of Yeats and Stevens. It is perhaps the most ambitious piece in the collection, and its placement situates it as the capstone of Vendler’s career as a devout reader of poetry (or, as Frank Kermode put it, an ‘author with an almost devout passion for good poems’). There is, perhaps, a coldness to the essay, which is not particularly suited to my temperament, though, in all fairness, it seems to have been a source for Vendler’s humane wisdom. ‘Episode by episode, experiment by experiment’, she writes, ‘God has died on the poetic page, and has been replaced, as Dickinson prophesied, by a new Truth.’
I read that with a shiver but am reminded of Stevens’s ‘since we are poor, a warmth’. It is fitting that Vendler should close her Last Essays by quoting the ‘scrawny cry’ from the last poem of Stevens’s Collected Poems, ‘Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself.’ Stevens’s poem of the ‘Thing Itself’ does not quite end with the veritable ding an sich but with a simile: ‘It was like / A new knowledge of reality.’ In her Yeats essay, she praised the poet for ending ‘The Second Coming’ with a question, and Vendler closes her collection with similar epistemic reserve: ‘Only posterity will know whether the scrawny cry of the abstract was a necessary move for the invention of a new poetics.’
Despite this reserve, one of the many delights of Vendler’s work is the almost aphoristic quality of some of her pronouncement. Will they become ‘loosed quotes’? Sylvia Plath is the ‘first adequate and observant poet of motherhood.’ ‘No one ever thanked him’ — from Robert Hayden’s ‘Those Winter Sundays’ — is ‘the line of the poem that no one can ever forget.’ Walt Whitman’s ‘profound imagination of another’s existence justified his unforgettable line, “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.”’ Such claims of firstness and adequateness, of unforgettability, and of justification are, of course, disputable, but Vendler has earned them through her lifetime of fine judgement, and ought to be weighed and considered.
Indeed, it often feels as though Vendler suffered and was there. ‘After an unbearable death’, she tells us, ‘nothing comes to mind but Lear’s five-word line’: ‘Never, never, never, never, never.’ Reading these comments, I am reminded that Elijah did not hear God’s voice in earthquake or in fire but in ‘a still small voice.’ Turning the leaves of her book, I often hear the Wordsworthian ‘still sad music of humanity’; and, like Wordsworth’s lines, her pages are not without ‘the joy / Of elevated thoughts’. The world is richer for them, and for their admonitions to inhabit the poem. I would like to give Vendler the last word, since she articulated something that I, and perhaps many others, have felt, but have not so expressed: ‘The melody of the poem enters the reader invisibly, as if it were a transfusion.’
Indeed, the most familiar of poems become rich and strange as Vendler turns her attention to them. ‘It Must Change’, so Stevens titled the second section of Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction, where he writes, ‘The freshness of transformation is / The freshness of a world. It is our own, / It is ourselves, the freshness of ourselves’. Freshness is the precise word for the feeling I get from Vendler’s work. ‘Nature is never spent’, Hopkins writes, ‘There lives the dearest freshness deep down things’; poetry is never spent either. The first essay of Inhabit the Poem, ‘Loosed Quotes’, offers a stunning re-reading of William Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’. It is scarcely conceivable that the film of familiarity should have grown over so astonishing a poem, and yet it has. It has fallen prey, Vendler tells us, to the ‘[j]ournalists and critics’ who take the statements from its opening octave ‘as final assertions of Yeats’s own beliefs’. It has become the ‘Loosed Quotes’ of Vendler’s title, and Yeats is made into ‘a pundit’. I myself was guilty, when I read the poem in an airport before Vendler’s essay, of tweeting the lines:
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
In Vendler’s sinewy reading, the second stanza of the poem traces Yeats’s ‘turn away from his initial confident (and baseless) soothsaying to a personal, transitory (and therefore uncertain), private “revelation,’’ motivated by a ‘desire for authentically human speech’. Poignantly and rightly, Vendler laments both the reductive image of Yeats in the popular imagination, determined as it is by the ‘loosed quotes’ of the poem’s opening, along with the still more terrible loss of the poem’s ‘human drama’.
Vendler’s second essay, ‘The Enigmatical Beauty of Each Beautiful Enigma’, is scarcely less rich than her first; reading it, I am reminded of Harold Bloom’s review of her 1969 study On Extended Wings, where he declares her ‘a commentator almost clairvoyant’. In this brief essay, many of the difficulties of Stevens’s ‘The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws’ melt beneath her touch, especially as she draws upon the biographical details of Stevens’s challenging marriage to explicate the poem. The titular bird turns out to be a self-portrait of its author. Stevens himself is ‘the blind starving bird in a charnel house of former selves who nonetheless has not lost his brooding spirit’. Or, if it is not exactly a self-portrait, the poem nevertheless captures a moment or a mood from Stevens’s life and ‘transfuses’ this moment or mood, this ‘living state’ into the reader. Confronted by this bewildering poem, Vendler asks, ‘What was the work that the poet was demanding of me?’ and her glorious answer is, ‘[T]o inhabit the poem, to live willingly in its world.’
Her dedication to inhabiting the poems she discusses ensures that Vendler never fails to illuminate them, even when I am not fully convinced by the key thrusts of her argument, such as her contention that John Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnet 14’ is not a prayer. Whatever its shortcomings, the chapter opens with an invaluable Yeatsian meditation of what a lyric poem is and does — ‘a lyric poem is a simulacrum of a succession of human moods, conducting us through their rapid transitions and self-contradictions’ — and, with this definition in place, she seeks to recover the human impact of Donne’s sonnet even in the aftermath of the so-called Death of God. Having traced the poem’s unique succession of moods, Vendler revels in how it imparts to the reader ‘the vivid sensation that God will not refuse salvation, but will, by a steady infusion of light, transform spiritual passivity into a cherished mutuality of enthralled self and ravished soul.’
The 13th, concluding essay of the book, ‘Can Poetry Be Abstract?’, opens with Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson, before expanding with a centrifugal energy to include Coleridge, Keats, Hardy, Eliot, Ashberry, as well as reprisals of Yeats and Stevens. It is perhaps the most ambitious piece in the collection, and its placement situates it as the capstone of Vendler’s career as a devout reader of poetry (or, as Frank Kermode put it, an ‘author with an almost devout passion for good poems’). There is, perhaps, a coldness to the essay, which is not particularly suited to my temperament, though, in all fairness, it seems to have been a source for Vendler’s humane wisdom. ‘Episode by episode, experiment by experiment’, she writes, ‘God has died on the poetic page, and has been replaced, as Dickinson prophesied, by a new Truth.’
I read that with a shiver but am reminded of Stevens’s ‘since we are poor, a warmth’. It is fitting that Vendler should close her Last Essays by quoting the ‘scrawny cry’ from the last poem of Stevens’s Collected Poems, ‘Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself.’ Stevens’s poem of the ‘Thing Itself’ does not quite end with the veritable ding an sich but with a simile: ‘It was like / A new knowledge of reality.’ In her Yeats essay, she praised the poet for ending ‘The Second Coming’ with a question, and Vendler closes her collection with similar epistemic reserve: ‘Only posterity will know whether the scrawny cry of the abstract was a necessary move for the invention of a new poetics.’
Despite this reserve, one of the many delights of Vendler’s work is the almost aphoristic quality of some of her pronouncement. Will they become ‘loosed quotes’? Sylvia Plath is the ‘first adequate and observant poet of motherhood.’ ‘No one ever thanked him’ — from Robert Hayden’s ‘Those Winter Sundays’ — is ‘the line of the poem that no one can ever forget.’ Walt Whitman’s ‘profound imagination of another’s existence justified his unforgettable line, “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.”’ Such claims of firstness and adequateness, of unforgettability, and of justification are, of course, disputable, but Vendler has earned them through her lifetime of fine judgement, and ought to be weighed and considered.
Indeed, it often feels as though Vendler suffered and was there. ‘After an unbearable death’, she tells us, ‘nothing comes to mind but Lear’s five-word line’: ‘Never, never, never, never, never.’ Reading these comments, I am reminded that Elijah did not hear God’s voice in earthquake or in fire but in ‘a still small voice.’ Turning the leaves of her book, I often hear the Wordsworthian ‘still sad music of humanity’; and, like Wordsworth’s lines, her pages are not without ‘the joy / Of elevated thoughts’. The world is richer for them, and for their admonitions to inhabit the poem. I would like to give Vendler the last word, since she articulated something that I, and perhaps many others, have felt, but have not so expressed: ‘The melody of the poem enters the reader invisibly, as if it were a transfusion.’