Soul Says: On Recent Poetry

by Helen Vendler

“Vendler again demonstrates―if proof were needed―why she is the finest poetry reviewer in the country.”
―Boston Globe

The renowned critic of Stevens, Keats, and Herbert turns an incisive gaze to her contemporaries, from Louise Glück to Rita Dove.

Lyric poetry, says the incomparable Helen Vendler, is defined by immediacy. If the novel aspires to represent life in all its complexity, with characters woven into their manifold historical and sociological contexts, lyric captures the human being in the here and as a fragment, an eruption, or a “set of warring passions independent of time and space.” Fiction constructs selfhood, but poetry gives us the soul.

Drawing its title from a poem by Jorie Graham, Soul Says collects twenty-one of Vendler’s best essays on the force, beauty, and formal intricacies of late-twentieth-century verse. Whether meditating on Graham’s roving cinematography of the mind, anatomizing the inversions of classical elegy in Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish,” or exploring Charles Simic’s sinister landscapes, Vendler makes difficult poetry accessible and helps readers appreciate the depth and richness of even the simplest texts. Through her perceptive eyes we see how lyric poetry, pulsing with musicality, uses arrangement, pacing, and metaphor to illuminate the hidden corners of inner life.

Inner life cannot be entirely disentangled from the Rita Dove cannot write as if she were unencumbered by her life as a Black woman in America any more than Seamus Heaney can avoid his experience as a Northern Irishman who lived through the Troubles. But Vendler’s painstaking attention to form―Dove’s angular stanzas, Heaney’s organicism―brilliantly reveals how such great poets exceed the sum of their biographical parts. To read their poetry is to see their lives transfigured, and, in the process, to reconsider our own.

Genres: Poetry

284 pages, Paperback

First published March 31, 1995

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

[Streator Johnson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have alwasy been fascinated wtih the idea of poetry. It seems like such a noble thing to use words and allusion to paint a picture of feelings and emotions. How cool is that? Unfortunately, the reality is that I rarely feel like understand what the poet is trying to do when I delve into poems. As a result, this may be the first book on my list that comes in at less than three stars. And one of the few I didn't finish. Ms. Vendler was recommended to me by a friend as someone who said she was good at explaining how to understand poetry. But, as I wrote back to her:

"When I sit down to read it, I feel like I am wearing some sort of special helmet that does not allow the ideas Ms. Vendler is trying to get across to enter my brain. In my mind's eye, I see them floating up from the book toward my head and going "PING" as they hit my brain helmet and bouncing off into outer space to be viewed with confusion by the various alien races inhabiting our universe. I must say it does make me feel a little stupid. But really, what can you do with a paragraph like this:

'Modern dismantlers of the notion of selfhood have pointed out that each of us is less a "unified self" than a site traversed by the discourse of which we have been exposed. The amalgam of multiple discourse in you "is" you; consciousness is coextensive with the languages in which it is conceived. The free-will or constructivist version of this idea gives you some agency in picking and choosing your discourses, whereas the determinist version finds you helplessly passive in your absorption of the discourse of your cultural and environmental moment."

I have no idea what that means and it did nothing to make me feel closer to understanding poetry as a whole. And I am all the sorrier for tht fact. This book is probably right a lot of peoples' alley. I am, unfortunatelyn not one of them.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

She is interested in poetry and right there earns my undying love. I wish she'd write a few essays while drunk. I wish she'd drop acid. This woman was told she wasn't welcome at Harvard grad school because she's a woman. Pioneer. She needs someone to guide her to noncanonical (sp?) poets. I blogged about her at My 3,000 Loving Arms: http://my3000lovingarms.blogspot.com/...