Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery by Helen Vendler

by Helen Vendler

When a poet addresses a living person--whether friend or enemy, lover or sister--we recognize the expression of intimacy. But what impels poets to leap across time and space to speak to invisible listeners, seeking an ideal intimacy--George Herbert with God, Walt Whitman with a reader in the future, John Ashbery with the Renaissance painter Francesco Parmigianino? In "Invisible Listeners," Helen Vendler argues that such poets must invent the language that will enact, on the page, an intimacy they lack in life.Through brilliantly insightful and gracefully written readings of these three great poets over three different centuries, Vendler maps out their relationships with their chosen listeners. For his part, Herbert revises the usual "vertical" address to God in favor of a "horizontal" one-addressing God as a friend. Whitman hovers in a sometimes erotic, sometimes quasi-religious language in conceiving the democratic camerado, who will, following Whitman's example, find his true self. And yet the camerado will be replaced, in Whitman's verse, by the ultimate invisible listener, Death. Ashbery, seeking a fellow artist who believes that art always distorts what it represents, finds he must travel to the remote past. In tones both tender and skeptical he addresses Parmigianino, whose extraordinary self-portrait in a convex mirror furnishes the poet with both a theory and a precedent for his own inventions.By creating the forms and speech of ideal intimacy, these poets set forth the possibility of a more complete and satisfactory human interchange--an ethics of relation that is uncoerced, understanding, and free.

Genres: Poetry, Literary Criticism, Essays

Paperback

First published August 22, 2005

About the author

Helen Vendler is the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, where she received her PhD in English and American Literature in 1960. Before joining the Harvard faculty, Vendler taught at Cornell, Swarthmore, Haverford, Smith, and Boston University.



Vendler has written books on Yeats, Herbert, Keats, Stevens, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Heaney, and, most recently, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (2007), Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill (2010); Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries’ (2010); and The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry (2015). She also reviews contemporary poetry for the New Republic, London Review of Books, and other journals. She has held fellowships from, among others, the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Woodrow Wilson Center, and National Endowment for the Humanities, and is a member of the American Philosophical Society, American Academy of Arts and Letters, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Swedish Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Modern Language Association, of which she was president in 1980.

Reviews

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Helen Vendler examine's the work of three poets-George Herbert, Walt Whitman, and John Ashbery (whose 90th birthday was just celebrated)-in the light of their projected "invisible listeners." In the case of Herbert, the listener is divine, in the case of Whitman, a future person, perhaps lover, and in the case of Ashbery, a past artist (Parmigianino, whose Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and the poet's reactions to it become the basis for the famous poem with that name). Each poet moves from the self-enclosed state of the lyric poem to a colloquy that embraces the "other".

Vendler utilizes extensive quotes from the work of the poets to illuminate her discussion. One of the reasons that I read this book so slowly was (aside from its denseness) I kept looking up and reading the poems quoted in their entirety. The analyses are interesting and provide tremendous insights into the work of the poets discussed.

How to use the form of a lyric poem-its syntax, word choices, all of its many formal elements-to both express personal experience while extending it to move beyond the merely personal, to include the (or a) reader is something about which I have become very interested and Vendler's work addressed that concern in detail. This was especially true in her section about John Ashbery, the discussion of whom I found most compelling of the three poets (I could not put it down-it was exciting as the proverbial "page turner"!). How Ashbery takes his personal experience of viewing an art work and uses it both to express his own struggle as a poet and to extend this meditation into an invitation to the reader to contemplate ethics and morality is amazing to me.

Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery is an important contribution to the literature about poets and their writing. I learned so much not only about these poets but more generally ways to approach a poem as well as using these tools to examine my life as well as my reading and to connect the two experiences.

A wonderful work.

[Tammy Marie Jacintho · Rating 5 out of 5]

Helen Vendler's "Invisible Listeners" is a fascinating read. It is a luminous study of three major literary minds-- Learning from these Masters and the ways by which they create intimacy on the page has informed my work. Her analysis gives me a stronger sense of my own direction.

Although I can appreciate Ashbery's work; ultimately, I find his gestalt troublesome. Vendler does a brilliant job of showing Ashbery's genius, but I wish she had covered John Berryman instead. I hope she expands this work of criticism to include Berryman, because his work really needs to be analyzed in this way. He created remarkable intimacy in the creation of his alter egos--Mr. Bones and Henry-- and I don't think we have had adequate study on this subject.

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

For anyone who is a love of George Herbert. Vendler has a sharp eye and wonderfully exciting interpretations of my best-loved poems.

[Zach · Rating 3 out of 5]

Helen Vendler explores the varying ways in which these poets create a sense of intimacy and connection with their audiences through their lyric poetry. The book delves into the unique mechanisms each poet uses to craft a personal voice, inviting readers into their contemplative and introspective worlds.

This may spark a poetry era.

[Catherine Corman · Rating 5 out of 5]

And the poem
Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.

-John Ashbery, Paradoxes and Oxymorons
quoted in Invisible Listeners

[Abigail · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely piece. Her analysis of Herbert is the work that made me fell in love with his poetry...finally. The chapter on Whitman is also quite good.