"The best close reader of poems to be found on the literary pages."
"There is in all Vendler's dealings with poetry...an appetite, a feeling,
and a love....In her brilliant fusion of reviewing and criticism Helen Vendler
is the legitimate successor to R. P. Blackmur and Randall Jarrell."
"Helen Vendler is undoubtedly one of the finest close readers of a poem we have....There is just no way of summarizing a critic as subtle and meticulous as this."
Publication date: November 15, 1997
For more information, please contact Liz Pelton, publicity director, at 617-495-4713 or the
Vendler has turned her attention to the Sonnets for several compelling reasons. First, she greatly admires the Sonnets and wants to share their rich beauty with readers. As lyric poems, the Sonnets are not well-suited to the social and psychological approaches they are so often subjected to by contemporary critics, Vendler argues. These approaches are more appropriate for the study of novels or plays. In her introduction, Vendler writes, "The art of seeing drama in linguistic action proper is an art that has lapsed, even in interpreters whose criteria appear to be literary rather than political or psychological. Existing editorial and critical accounts do not, to my mind, pay enough attention to the Sonnets as poems--that is, as a writer's projects invented to amuse and challenge his own capacity for inventing artworks." In The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Vendler revives for readers a sense of the drama that lies in the words and structures of Elizabethan lyric.
Second, most close study of the Sonnets has been limited to the 10 or 15 most famous. The Sonnets represent a large body of relatively unexamined Shakespearean lines, and Vendler clearly relishes the chance to share her discoveries about these little-known but masterly poems with others. Her elation at figuring out what Shakespeare is up to in each poem is contagious.
"To arrive at the understandings proposed in my Commentary, I found it necessary to learn the Sonnets by heart....No pianist or violinist would omit to learn a sonata by heart before interpreting it in public performance, but the equal habit of knowing poetry by heart before interpreting it has been lost. I first memorized many of the Sonnets...in the heartfelt way of youth, and I hope I have not lost that 'heartfelt' sense of the poems. But I have since learned to love in a more conscious way Shakespeare's elated variety of invention, his ironic capacity, his astonishing refinement of technique, and, above all, the reach of his skeptical, imaginative intent. I hope in this Commentary to illustrate those qualities, as well as, from time to time, the pathos, reflectiveness, and moral urgency already well described by previous readers."
"[The Sonnets] deserve detailed and particular commentary because they comprise a virtual anthology of lyric possibility--in the poet's choice of subgenres, in arrangements of words, in tone, in dramatic modeling of the inner life, in speech-acts."
"The ethics of lyric writing lies in the accuracy of its representation of inner life, and in that alone."
"The persistent wish to turn the sequence into a novel (or a drama) speaks to the interests of the sociopsychological critic, whose aim is less to inquire into the successful carrying-out of a literary project than to investigate the representation of gender relations...It does no good to act as if these lyrics were either a novel or a documentary of a lived life."
"The 'story' of the Sonnets continues to fascinate readers, but lyric is both more and less than story...A coherent psychological account of the Sonnets is what the Sonnets exist to frustrate. They do not fully reward psychological criticism...any more than they do political criticism."
"The true 'actors' in lyric are words, not 'dramatic persons' and the drama of any lyric is constituted by the successive entrances of new sets of words...Thus, the introduction of a new linguistic strategy is, in a sonnet, as interruptive and interesting as the entrance of a new character in a play."
"A writer of Shakespeare's seriousness writes from internal necessity--to do the best he can under his commission...and to perfect his art. What is the inner agenda of the Sonnets? What are their compositional motivations? What does a writer gain from working, over and over, in one subgenre? My brief answer is that Shakespeare learned to find strategies to enact feeling in form, feelings in forms, multiplying both to a superlative degree through 154 poems. No poet has ever found more linguistic forms by which to replicate human responses than Shakespeare in the Sonnets."
"I leave a record here of what one person has remarked so that others can compare their own noticings with mine. In such a way, we may advance our understanding of Shakespeare's procedures as a working poet--that is, as a master of aesthetic strategy."
THE ART OF SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS
Helen Vendler
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
$35.00 hardcover / 576 pages
154 facsimiles, audio CD of Helen Vendler reading 65 of the Sonnets
Harvard University Press Publicity Department
Harvard University Press is proud to announce the publication of The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Helen Vendler's long-awaited Commentary on all 154 lyric poems. The book presents the 1609 Quarto version of each sonnet alongside Helen Vendler's own modernized version, followed by her comments on the poem's significant features. It is accompanied by an audio CD of Vendler reading 65 of the Sonnets in a way that reflects her deep study of them. For all who love the Sonnets, lyric poetry, and Shakespeare, this important work, nine years in the making, is a landmark.
"Because a comprehension of the internal logic and the 'old finery' of Elizabethan lyric has now almost vanished, I have written this Commentary to restore them to view as they appear in Shakespeare's Sonnets. I hope, of course, that the logic and the finery will be relished as soon as seen."
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