Helen Vendler > Quotes

“In the final analysis, it is not critics who create literary canons, it is other writers who create them .... A writer can have published thirty-seven volumes, but if that writer doesn't interest other writers, they will all molder in the library and nobody will ever want to read them again.”
― Helen Vendler

“Each poem leads you to the questions it makes sense to ask it.”
― Helen Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology

“One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways.”
― Helen Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology

“Without play at many levels of language, from phonemes to logical structures, a poem is merely prose with linebreaks added.”
― Helen Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology

“A poem needs imaginative rhythms as well as imaginative transformation of content.”
― Helen Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology

“...what delights the poet is 'unintelligibility' ...(where) language doesn't sound like anything anyone could possibly say in 'real life' or in 'real philosophy.”
― Helen Vendler, Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats

“Long Years apart - can make no
Breach a second cannot fill -
The absence of the Witch does not
Invalidate the spell -”
― Helen Vendler, Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries

“The war in the poem between the warmth of Keatsian language and the chill of metaphysical analysis means that Stevens has not achieved a style that can embrace both the physical pine and the metaphysical pine.”
― Helen Vendler, The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry

“To create the new we must first de-create the old; and the reality of decreation (as Stevens called it, borrowing the word from Simone Weil) is as strong as the reality of creation.”
― Helen Vendler, Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire