Helen Vendler, poetry critic, 90
Helen Vendler, a literary scholar and reviewer of poetry who was revered and feared in equal measures, whose scalpel-sharp critiques could elevate or wound careers and who introduced hundreds of poets to a wider audience, died April 23 at her home in Laguna Niguel, Calif. She was 90.
The cause of death was cancer, said her son, David Vendler.
Among poets writing in English — and especially Americans — Dr. Vendler stood as a powerful gatekeeper in the same way that top theater critics can make or break a Broadway show. For the reading public, meanwhile, she helped bring attention to poets and their work with reviews in the New Republic, the London Review of Books, the New Yorker and other outlets.
Her clout grew steadily over more than five decades through a prolific output of reviews and more than two dozen books. She also carried added sway as a longtime poetry judge for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, as well as a nominator for the “genius” grants of the MacArthur Foundation.
Literary critic Bruce Bawer called her “the colossus of contemporary American poetry criticism.”
“I do understand, I think, what it feels like to be a poet, even though I’m not one,” Dr. Vendler once said at Harvard University, where she began teaching in the 1980s. “I was born with a mind that likes condensed and unusual language, which is what you get from poetry.”
She acknowledged that poetry was often a deeply personal experience for the reader. “You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem,” she told the Paris Review. “You are the voice in the poem.” But she also made clear what she favored and why.
Dr. Vendler objected to poetry that pushed an ideology, an instinct she traced back to her dismay over the controls of the Catholic Church during her education while growing up in Boston. She could find kinship with poets exploring the world through a woman’s eyes, recalling the cold reception she received in the 1950s as a graduate student at Harvard’s English Department.
She insisted that her goal wasn’t to be an arbiter of poetry. She instead regarded herself as an interpreter of the craft, seeking to analyze the form, flow, intent and literary inspirations behind a piece. Harold Bloom, a noted literary critic, called her the ultimate “close reader.”
“Reviewing doesn’t mean much if your fellow poets don’t think you are good,” Dr. Vendler told the New York Times in 1997. “The canon is made by poets themselves.”
Yet there was no doubt of the boost she gave to those she praised, such as Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney; Rita Dove, the U.S. poet laureate from 1993 to 1995; and Pulitzer winner Jorie Graham. (During the early 1970s, Dr. Vendler helped select poets whose work was evaluated by the New York Times Book Review.)
“She is like a receiving station picking up on each poem, unscrambling things out of word-waves, making sense of it and making sure of it. She can second-guess the sixth sense of the poem,” Heaney once said.