Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 17 Number 1, April 2016
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Vendler, Helen. The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry. Harvard University Press, 2015. 444pp, ISBN: 978-0-674-73656-6, Hardback £25.95.
Reviewed by
Buddhist Chaplain, Exeter University
Helen Vendler has spent her long professional career (she is now in her eighties) writing about poetry and poets. She is one of the most respected literary critics in America, and has been for many decades. This collection of essays is both an excellent introduction to her work and a fine testament to the depth and range of her interests and expertise. The book is beautifully produced by Harvard University Press.
Vendler’s autobiographical introduction gives us a series of reflections on both her own decision-making about embarking on a career as an academic and critic, and an insight into how she approaches literary criticism, especially writing about poetry. She describes how she decided quite early on to focus on her first loves, poetry and poets, at a time when it was unusual to channel all one’s critical expertise into one genre. Vendler considers her vocation to be that of a critic, rather than a scholar – “a reader and writer more taken by texts than by contexts.” (3) To her, “the natural act of a critic is to compare, and I was always comparing.” (5) She is robust in affirming her view that clear judgments can be made about the relative quality of one text in relation to another: “Those who suppose there are no criteria for such judgments merely expose their own incapacity.” (3) There is no shying away from her own self-belief, or her belief that “anyone literate in poetry” can see why some poems (and poets) are superior to others. In this sense, Vendler could be described as a cultural elitist - though the “anyone” in the above quote suggests a belief that everyone can be part of the elite if they devote time and energy to reading and learning about poetry.
Although she distinguishes between her own role as a critic and that of a professional scholar, she does accept that “a critic of my sort is, I suppose, learned in a way – that is, she has a memory for stories, styles, and structures she has seen before, and she understands the expressive possibilities latent in writing […] She remembers the combinations and permutations of words and syntax that she has come across, and is curious about the power of new assemblages.” (ibid) This statement could be taken as a manifesto for her whole life’s work as a critic. Though she disavows any pretensions to be a “scholar” she is very scholarly in her approach - demonstrating over and over again her learning, analytical vigour, discernment and passionate sense of enquiry. It is this sense of criticism as enquiry, powered by curiosity and a desire to know how texts are constructed and made to work as they do, that underpins all of Vendler’s criticism. She is both a deeply questioning interrogator and a great enthusiast for her carefully selected subjects.
Though Vendler is often labelled a “formalist”, she doesn’t act as an apologist for a particular critical theory or ideology, indeed she seems to approach each poem and poet with a surprising openness, though this is informed by a lifetime of reading, questioning and study. There is a clear-headed modesty to her writing that belies her status as a prominent critic. But she is also wittily cognisant of her own abilities: “just as I would be incompetent as a theorist or a new historicist, I’ve seen that many scholars are incompetent as interpreters of poetry.” (ibid) She is very wary of the tendency of scholars and theorists to use a carefully selected poem to “illustrate an ideological point” and thus to “falsify both the poem and the poet in question.” (4) For her, the poem as artefact is paramount. While she exercises her role as elucidator, interpreter, evaluator and enthusiast, it is to each poem she returns – to its structure, syntax, methods and styles, that she unpicks like a locksmith to show us how it works and what it does.
From her fifteenth year, when she rebelled against her Catholic upbringing by remaining seated and silent when everyone in her church rose to make a pledge in Sunday Mass, Vendler has associated reading, writing and thinking for herself as acts of liberation, unfreezing, or unloosing “the old constrictive bonds.” (9) She speaks warmly of, Morton Berman, one of her teachers at Boston University (that “intellectual utopia”), as entering “with entire sympathy into the minds of the writers he taught.” (ibid) In this collection of essays, Vendler demonstrates over and over again how this can be done, through a close and critical examination of what her chosen poets have written – working outwards from the texts to unearth what was going on in the mind of each poet. In a sense her work shows how “meditation on a poem could open into further and further depths of perception.” (10) And it seems that for Vendler, this process of unfolding perceptions has no end, there is no definitive evaluation or interpretation to be reached, but only a continuous fluid process of attention, response and renewed attention. She mentions how her first encounter with Paul de Man and his deconstructive analysis of Valery, Rilke and Stevens, provided a “salutary countering of unity, coherence, and emphasis with dispersal, contradiction, and disjunction.” (11) Vendler never seems to be looking for closure in her criticism. Instead she is always looking anew and probing further each time she returns to poems and poets that interest her.
This brings us to another important aspect of Vendler’s ambitious prospectus for poetry criticism: her belief that poetry provides an account or evocation of that most enigmatic and ineffable process, human consciousness. She writes that, “poems as histories of human consciousness, describe complex truths of human response, and they structure words with particular force, wit, charm, intellectual responsibility, and plangency.” (14) The poetry critic examines and interprets the history of human consciousness presented in any particular poem or sequence of poems.
Vendler argues that the endeavours of poets and other artists should be located at the centre of the humanities, not at the periphery, as is usually thought. Art, dance, music, poetry and other artefacts should be the “central objects of study, not the texts of historians or philosophers […] after all it is by their arts that cultures are principally remembered.” (15) The arts have this primary importance because they “present the whole uncensored human person.” (16) In her copious writings as journalist-critic and as scholarly essayist, Vendler is energised by this belief in the vital importance of artistic production as being “true to the way we are and were, to the way we actually live and have lived – as singular persons swept by drives and affections, not as collective entities or sociological paradigms.” (ibid) We might extrapolate sociological or collective trends and tendencies from individual artefacts or oeuvres, but we mustn’t impose these on artworks and artists. It is always the actual artefact that embodies human consciousness in all its nuanced experiential exactitude.
As a final thought on Vendler’s forceful and clear statement of what scholarly criticism is all about, we come to this impassioned sentence: “Critics and scholars are evangelists, plucking the public by the sleeve, saying, ‘Look at this,’ or ‘Listen to this,’ or ‘See how this works.’” (16) Note both the religious metaphor, and the modesty! Urging others to look, listen and see, is to accept and celebrate the need for a multiplicity of individual perspectives and interpretations – not something we usually associate with an ‘elitist’ and ‘formalist’ critical position. The teenage girl who sits in church in silence while everyone else stands and recites a pledge, becomes the woman who urges everyone to look, listen and see, and to think for themselves about life, the arts and poetry.
Although Vendler returns many times to particular poems, poets and themes, her interests and expertise are wide-ranging. In this book she writes about Walt Whitman, W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot, and the contemporary poets, Jorie Graham, Mark Ford and Lucie Brock-Broido - with poets as different as Allen Ginsberg, Seamus Heaney and A.R. Ammons thrown in for good measure. There are three essays on Stevens, two each on Heaney, Ammons, James Merrill, Graham, Ford and John Ashbery, and other poets discussed include, Langston Hughes, Charles Wright, Amy Clampitt and Elizabeth Bishop. To each subject she brings the same level of scrutiny and care, exploring different aspects of the poems and the poetic methods of each poet.
In an essay titled, American X-Rays: Forty Years of Allen Ginsberg’s Poetry, Vendler focuses on the filmic qualities of Ginsberg’s writing – “a cinematically detailed immersion in present-tense immediacy.” (75) She notes that Ginsberg seems to have “no agenda”. When he describes, in the poem ‘Manhattan May Day Midnight’, some workmen tracking down a gas leak, we aren’t asked to “sympathize with the proletariat or to feel ecologically alarmed by the gas leak,” (ibid) we’re simply given the poet’s observation of the scene. For Vendler, this is evidence of Ginsberg’s “invincible interest in the real” which “liberates us into a participatory disinterestedness.” (ibid) This is a typical Vendler comment: concise, surprising and illuminating. She goes on to suggest that Ginsberg’s “mind roams widely, in unpredictable ways”, quoting from the poem: “I passed by hurriedly Thinking Ancient Rome, Ur / Were they like this, the same shadowy surveyors & passers-by / scribing records of decaying pipes and Garbage piles on Marble, Cuneiform.” (ibid). Vendler takes us into the poem and the evidence it gives us of Ginsberg’s mind in action, moving from perception to association and reflection on history. It is this revelation in the poem of the “texture of consciousness”, (76) Vendler points out, that links Ginsberg to the otherwise radically different poetry of T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens.
Immediately following the Ginsberg essay is an exemplary twelve-page discussion of an iconic poem: T.S. Eliot’s, The Waste Land – which was written as an introduction to The Arion Press, 1997, edition of Eliot’s work. Vendler is a critical, inquisitive and very informed guide to the poem - providing us with a brief biographical context and an outline of the structural layout. Vendler writes in a lively and compact way that entices the reader into what is often considered a very ‘difficult’ poem. She points out that Eliot begins his poem “in the most theatrical way possible, with a suicidal epigraph, a paradoxical epigram (‘April is the cruellest month’), a gabble of foreign voices, and then, with the dramatic rise of a curtain, a full view of his protagonist stranded in a desert under a pitiless sun.” (81) Vendler then switches from a theatrical metaphor to a cinematic one, describing how Eliot’s film evolves “episode by episode, montage by montage, anecdote by anecdote, all interspersed by the laments of the protagonist.” (82) She then mixes her metaphors by suggesting that the “dramatis personae become elements of a surreal portrait.” (ibid) These constantly shifting metaphors and reference points are typical of Vendler’s animated way of writing and it carries the reader along, provides clarity, and dexterously takes us to her next thoughtful comment. She suggests that The Waste Land is “an elegy for self, a ritual for the burial of the dead,” conveyed by Eliot in an almost journalistic manner. Vendler traces Eliot’s deployment of alternating high and low art, classical quote contrasted with the clipped London patter of Lil’s friend advising her to smarten herself up and give her husband, “poor Albert”, a good time after four years in the army. (84-85) Vendler is as helpful to the reader when focussing on pertinent details and when commenting on the sweep and scope of the poem.
The range of Vendler’s interests and critical concerns can be seen in chapters that include: an examination of “the usefulness of tradition” in Seamus Heaney’s “unsettling and surprising transformation of the Oresteia of Aeschylus (Chap. 9); an illuminating discussion of the way in which Wallace Stevens reworked and mined Keats’s, Ode To Autumn – showing how Stevens returns to the poem over and over again, finding each time new ideas, and a locus for formal inventions and associative digressions (Chap. 17); and, an analysis of Jorie Graham’s move from short-lined lyric poems to poems that employ long lines with “outriders”, and how this is indicative of a shift from line length based on the breath, to a line determined by Graham’s gaze – a redefining of poetic utterance such that it becomes the “tracking of the gaze” (Chap. 20).
One of the chapters, Prying Open for all the World to See, might have been an alternative title for Vendler’s excellent collection of essays. I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in poetry - particularly to those readers who are interested in the ways in which human consciousness is articulated and evoked in poems. Vendler is an excellent writer who eschews jargon and arcane terminology in favour of clear and concise prose that ‘pries open’ each poem in a way that all the world can see for themselves how the poem is made, how it works and how it might be interpreted.