Helen Vendler has died. I remember reading her book Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form as an undergraduate. Before I opened it, I instinctively predicted that she would over-read the poetry out of theoretical commitment; at the time I was generally suspicious of the restlessness of New Criticism not to privilege readings based on their plausible accordance with authorial intent. Reading Vendler disabused me of that bias. In Our Secret Discpline she ransacks the poetry not in order to evade the mind of the poet but to plunder it. She doesn’t devote a dozen pages to a dozen lines of poetry to prove some point about the freedom of the text from a ‘one, true’ meaning; she does the opposite. She is thorough and spares no detail, which avoids incoherence. She can make your head spin from the density of the analysis, but she never leads you into confusion. You don’t have to guess what she means; you just have to read slowly and work to absorb all of the preceding detail as you move through the exegesis. Vendler is not vague. That is a quality not to be taken for granted in literary criticism!
Vendler’s temporal breadth might be mistaken for an indulgently comparative method, but she is careful and exacting in her comparisons. Take her discussion of Yeats’ ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, stanza 3:
The first new possible identity for himself—that after his death he will be considered (by his readers) as a sage and admired for his wisdom—occurs to Yeats in this third station as he stands (we infer) in the Byzantine cathedral, Hagia Sophia, the church of the Holy Wisdom (the cathedral’s name probably suggests the name “sages” given to the persons the speaker now addresses). Yeats is contemplating a mural mosaic that shows sages standing against a background of gold, which, as the iconographic symbol for “God’s holy fire,” informs the observer that the sages addressed by the poet are located in heaven. (The actual mosaics that Yeats saw were in Ravenna, where there is a frieze of prophets identified by name; the imagined mosaic, we deduce, must also identify its personages by name—“Isaiah,” “Hosea,” “Jeremiah”—or the speaker would not know that these holy figures were “sages,” by contrast, say, to martyrs.) “When my body ends its existence, I could belong among these sages,” thinks Yeats, but knowing he cannot rise to heaven unaided, he implores their help. By addressing them as living beings, he looks “through” the mosaic before him to the “reality” that it represents—eternity and its inhabitants. This is the devotional practice recommended to believers—that they use the icon before them as a window to the celestial, praying to the “real” Virgin as they contemplate a sacred image of the Virgin. The other way of responding to an image—the way of the connoisseur, dwelling on manner and medium—does not treat the people in the image as really existing elsewhere, able to be addressed. As George Herbert says in “The Elixir”:
A man may look on glass,
And on it stay his eye;
Or, if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heavens espy.
Yeats chooses to “pass through” the mosaic (by demoting it to a simile) and “espy” the heaven beyond, so that he can cry out directly: “O sages standing in God’s holy fire / As in the gold mosaic of a wall.” His prayer to the sages is composed of a series of verbs begging that they will descend to save him and “gather” him back to their realm so that he can learn to sing under their instruction. The sages are to come (from the holy fire), perne (in a gyre), be the singing-masters of his soul, consume his heart away, and gather him— where?—into the artifice representing them and their eternal realm. In short, they are to descend, burn away his aching heart, rescue him from his dying body, and gather him into their company (leaving his consumed heart and his dead animal flesh behind). A whirling descent (a “perne” is a coneshaped bobbin; Yeats translates the noun into a verb) is followed by a whirling ascent, as the “me” of the speaker is “gathered” (as to Abraham’s bosom) into—and then the problem arises. What does it mean to be gathered “into the artifice of eternity”? (It is not the same as to be gathered into eternity.) And who is that “me”? Yeats begins to imagine what the consequences will be when that gathering has been accomplished. His disembodied and “heart-less” soul will have joined the choir of the sages, his singingmasters, and will have been taught by them to sing their changeless song, “Holy, holy, holy,” before the eternal throne of God. His dying animal will have died. With heart consumed, body dead, what is left that can properly be called “me”? Once this disintegration of his ego has occurred, and his soul is in the heaven of the sages, the mosaic, the artifice, that he now beholds will need to be “corrected”: there will then be one additional sage standing within the gold field, the translated-to-heaven W. B. Yeats, appearing with the other sages in the cathedral mosaic that visually represents them in eternity. (I take it that “the artifice of eternity” represents the effort to render visible in some art-form the invisibilia of the eternal; its counterpart, “the artifice of time,” is the effort to render in art intelligible temporal events.)
This is typical of Vendler: clarification via empathy. Before reading Vendler’s explication, that third stanza was, to me, nothing but an enigmatic mess of images relating to Yeats’ death and deification (à la Gregory of Naziansus). I also think she is so good at clarifying Yeats because she never read a single poem without keeping pretty much all of the others in mind — her mental capacity was astonishing.
Vendler’s systematic theory of Keats’ Odes is extraordinary. It is probably the most ‘continental’ of Vendler’s works which I’ve read. Treating the odes as a sequential allegory for the nature (the ontology and phenomenology, if you like) of artistic production, she lays bare the parallels between Spenser and Keats which most of us only vaguely register. As with Yeats, she describes poetic form as architecture and hopes to inhabit the odes like palaces which have ‘inexhaustible internal relations’. She plumbs the depths of these possible internal relations in a heroic struggle against the prevailing fact that the odes must be read line by line, in time. I think part of the fun of the fact that ‘stanza’ means ‘room’ is that it compares written media with visual in spite of the fact that to read and understand poetry (especially odes, whose arguments are obsessed with the passage of time) is a far more linear than it is a spatial experience. Gotthold Lessing’s famous nacheinander/ nebeneinander binary (while painting represents things side-by-side, poetry represents things one after the other) remains true, showing up the futility of the architectural analogy which Vendler would go on to deploy. That is not to detract from Vendler’s Keatsian system. The attempt to inhabit these poems spatially, to dart from one semantic ‘corner’ to another out of linear order, is admirable not least because it requires memorisation and meditative rumination.
Another thing: there’s such a generosity of spirit in Vendler’s assumption that Keats ‘co-creates’ with the reader when interrogating the Grecian Urn and the possibility of representing nature in art. It’s true that the poem prompts the reader to think fruitfully on the subject if the reader possesses the kind of curiosity and imaginative lustre so familiar to Vendler.
I don’t adopt Vendler’s reading of Keats’ ‘To Autumn’. She thoroughly justifies her view of personified Autumn as a classical goddess and in that sense persuades the reader like a lawyer would a jury. Still, I automatically envision a male figure, whose life cycle from plundering harvester to spent labourer the poem conjures, when I remember the ode. The thing about Vendler is that, even when I don’t officially abandon my interpretation to be consistent with hers, I tend to be persuaded in the moment of reading her.
I sometimes wonder whether her husband, the philosopher of language Zeno Vendler known for his work on verbal aspect, influenced Vendler’s work. Her readings don’t just attend to rhetoric and semantics but zoom into parts of speech. I haven’t been able to find any detail about their meeting of minds and Helen certainly seems to have been deliberately private. We inevitably find out a lot about her character in her criticism and I am satisfied with that: she was insatiable, refusing to be yoked to a given literary epoch, writing books on Herbert, Shakespeare, Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, the confessional poets, even Pope. She was industrious, an academic hero to many because of this fact above all else. She was empathetic with her poets, whose work she often discussed as work (toilsome, fraught, given to failure).
Next on my list to read is The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham. I can’t wait to see what she says about Hopkins in particular.
ah, such a shame - she was brilliant. her introduction to the anthology of contemporary american poetry is worth the price of entry alone.