Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats

by Vendler

Poetry has often been considered an irrational genre, more expressive than logical, more meditative than given to coherent argument. And yet, in each of the four very different poets she considers here, Helen Vendler reveals a style of thinking in operation; although they may prefer different means, she argues, all poets of any value are thinkers.

The four poets taken up in this volume―Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and William Butler Yeats―come from three centuries and three nations, and their styles of thinking are characteristically idiosyncratic. Vendler shows us Pope performing as a satiric miniaturizer, remaking in verse the form of the essay, Whitman writing as a poet of repetitive insistence for whom thinking must be followed by rethinking, Dickinson experimenting with plot to characterize life’s unfolding, and Yeats thinking in images, using montage in lieu of argument.

With customary lucidity and spirit, Vendler traces through these poets’ lines to find evidence of thought in lyric, the silent stylistic measures representing changes of mind, the condensed power of poetic thinking. Her work argues against the reduction of poetry to its (frequently well-worn) themes and demonstrates, instead, that there is always in admirable poetry a strenuous process of thinking, evident in an evolving style―however ancient the theme―that is powerful and original.

Genres: Poetry, Literary Criticism, Criticism, Essays, Academic, Nonfiction, Literary Fiction

142 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

These are lectures given by Professor Helen Vendler. I don’t know if these are for the average reader, as I found myself in the weeds a bit, and at times it was difficult to follow her reasoning. She has a very powerful mind and has read deeply of the poets here, but I don’t know if I gained a better understanding of each poet. This is, perhaps, a book to go back to periodically in small amounts. I did like her description of Pope as a great essayist who wrote in verse.

[Jacob Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book overcame my resistance to Pope.

[Kevin Lawrence · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is not one of Vendler’s better books. While supposedly four lectures occasioned by a residency at Cambridge University, the real impetus behind the theme of poetic thinking was a slight Vendler felt at not being invited to participate in a panel discussion of Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man at her own home institution, Harvard University; instead, she tells us, “a Harvard philosopher, a Harvard political scientist, and a non-Harvard anthropologist agreed to read the Essay on Man and comment on it” (how salubrious for this reader to be reminded that I belong to a whole category of people called “non-Harvard.”) Apparently, they found little of contemporary value in Pope’s poem from a modern philosophical, sociological, or anthropological point-of-view without taking any aesthetic qualities into consideration from Vendler’s point-of-view. So she has an ax to grind and, hence, these four essays. Vendler, however, is not a very theoretically-minded literary scholar or critic motivated by a particular aesthetic or philosophical agenda; instead, her strengths are revealed when she does close readings of individual poems and arrives at very keen observations (the same quality serves her well when we hear her evaluate the work of fellow critics, and so in her introduction she delightfully sums up Harold Bloom saying, “…[his] practical criticism employs a discourse relying more on exalted assertion than on assembled evidence.”) Because the value of her criticism relies so heavily on close-readings of individual poems, her work is only as good as the selection of poems she chooses to read. Personally, I don’t think Pope’s epistolary poem Essay on Man is as good as, say, The Dunciad or “The Rape of the Lock,” and so her essay does sound like she’s simply trying to show up her colleagues at Harvard (and the one from non-Harvard.) Once she can move from Pope to poets she is more compatible with, you’d expect her to find poems that demonstrate unique and valuable ways that poets think through poems; but her selection of Whitman is very curious (I would’ve expected her to turn to perhaps George Herbert or Stevens or Ashbery or even Robert Lowell, given her previous work.) The poems she chooses to illustrate Whitman’s supposed use of “reprise” are minor and even bathetic pieces, and so the essay suffers because the chosen material is not that great. Turning to Dickinson is, of course, very wise since she is such an exquisitely sophisticated and subtly mindful poet; but Vendler makes a mad dash (pardon the pun) from poem to poem without patiently settling on one or two poems where she can demonstrate her strength as a keen close reader. (Vendler is infinitely better in her book-length volume of readings of Dickinson poems, Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries , because the format allows both of these formidable intelligences to really shine.) The best essay in the book is the final one on Yeats where Vendler focuses on two late poems (“Among School Children” and “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”) and is worth a read by anyone interested in Yeats. More often than not, I learn something about poems through Vendler’s careful and meticulous critiques; in this volume, however, I felt like Vendler’s talents were not at her usual best.

[M · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll never cease to be amazed by what this woman and her close-reading skills can extract out of a poem. And it's not just the fact that her analysis is both insightful and very clear that makes her such an enjoyable critic, but also her capacity to make her reading transparent, to lead you through every step of her reasoning, and thus help YOU become a better critic. Thoroughly enjoyable.

[Sarah Key · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. I love the way Helen Vendler reads and thinks about poetry.

[Allen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and W.B. Yeats poems are parsed by this critic, who provides some learned insights, though with overly academic language. I came away with a new appreciation for Pope with my interest in the others’ poems decrescendoing with each critiqued poet. It didn’t help that the author has a penchant for morbid The book comes to a crashing thud concluding with one of Yeats’ surprisingly most lifeless creations—“The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” The section on Pope, however, brims with humor.

[Brian Wasserman · Rating 2 out of 5]

sheer blasphemy.. textual criticism like this is horrid, tries to imitate science but shouldnt even endeavor to imitate science.. i think poetic should be all about expression, aesthetic.. if you linger to interpret poems under the scope of theory you do not understand poetry and do little help people understand poetry or even improve their own endeavor to write it

[Mia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretentious writing style but at the same time delightful due to the depth of thought in this book. I enjoyed reading the author's reasonings and trains of thoughts regarding the approach to the different poems presented, but I didn't enjoy the style she used to do so. It's quite fluffy and academic, which some people might enjoy but wasn't for me.

[Amr Ibrahim.]

Ashes denote that Fire was –
Revere the Grayest Pile
For the Departed Creature’s sake
That hovered there awhile –
Fire exists the first in light
And then consolidates
Only the Chemist can disclose
Into what Carbonates –
Emily Dickinson1

[Andy Zhang]

took me two years to like whitman

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found it a very thought-provoking insight into the techniques of these four poets. I particularly enjoyed the analyses of Whitman and Yeats, with the Pope and Dickinson running close second. This is not popularized dumbed-down literary criticism, but a rigorous examination of substantive issues. You will get out of it what you put into it.

Pope: His caricature devices include synecdoche, diminutive nicknames, scientific reduction (gold is yellow dirt), classical allusion, anticlimax (wisest, brightest, meanest), and word substitution (damned to everlasting [condemnation] fame).

Whitman: One of his devices is to state things reportorially, and then to restate them from a position of extreme empathetic identification with the things described, shifting from an emphasis on verbs to an emphasis on nouns; narrative incident turns to lyric description.

Dickinson: She gives the semblance of control by dividing a process into a series of arbitrary slots which she fills with detail, e.g a poem about a train's journey makes several stops at certain places, but other possible places it could have stopped are not mentioned. Vendler labels this "chromatic linear advance." Early on there was a definite ending in her poems, but this became more ambiguous as she got older. Also, things went from being ordered chronologically to being ordered in an emotional hierarchy.

Yeats: Overlayed images to present a vertical harmony of choral unison. Here's a typical Vendler sentence: "Yeats's bitter diptychs, though presented serially, are contrived so as to assemble themselves ultimately into a densely overwritten palimpsest." He frequently moved a single poem's mode from narration to meditation to an ode.

That's about 120 pages of densely overwritten Helen Vendler in a nutshell.

[Ruby · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 Helen Vendler reads poems to expose the poet's thinking process behind it. This is particularly interesting because it really gives full credit to the poet, instead of rendering them a vessel through which inspiration passes. As for the actual content, I felt the Alexander Pope analysis was by far the strongest of the four. In the Dickinson, Whitman and Yeats analyses Vendler sometimes draws conclusions I do not always agree with. Nevertheless, this is a fantastic example of close reading and I'd like to read more Vendler, please.

[Ellen]

I like Helen Vendler-a lot. Always teaches me.
Ellie NYC

[Rebecca Helm-Ropelato · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vendler never disappoints. Extraordinary.