Praise for Helen Vendler
"The best close reader of poems to be found on the literary pages."
"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."
"Helen Vendler puts herself entirely at the service of the poets she is talking about. Although she writes too well to be invisible, she does not compete or pontificate either...What she does is offer the poetry to you."
"Helen Vendler is the best poetry reviewer in America. Her virtues are a rigorous attending to verbal structure and texture; the ability to quote appositely and economically; a sure though not a too-exclusive taste; above all, the ability to do the poem one better by putting into words the relevant responses we might have had if we'd been smarter and had more feeling...In her brilliant fusion of reviewing and criticism [she] is the legitimate successor to P. R. Blackmur and Randall Jarrell."
"It is the mark of [Vendler's] greatness as a critic that, when there is a conflict between the schematism and the poem, it is the schematism which must give way. The critic must be faithful to the poem, not to her preconceptions...Her readings of individual poems are rarely less than exemplary...The kind of thing [Vendler] is after is clear enough--the sort of poetry after which 'the world never seems the same again.' Of all critics, she seems one of those best qualified to find it."
"Vendler is a critic readers of poetry, inside the academy and out, should take seriously...She writes less as a scholar (though her learning is prodigious) than as one impelled by the special pleasure she finds in poems to trace each instance of that pleasure to its source...Poetry, which has for so long seemed to be approaching an ultimate marginality, surely needs defenders like Vendler, so committed to protecting its singularity as an art form."
"One of the pleasures of reading Vendler's criticism is that of seeing a poet's achievement lavishly appreciated...Vendler leads us through difficult poems...After [she does so], the poem is still to be read, and read again, word by word, line, sequence, image cut into image. We have to get back from the discursive model, which Vendler so clearly describes, to the local movement and texture of the poem. But after Vendler's commentary we are in a much better position to do so. I cannot think of a better justification for a critic's work."
"Vendler's readings help us to hear, and to discern, the sounds of the soul speaking."
Return to The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets Home Page
--Seamus Heaney, The Observer
--Marilyn Butler, Hudson Review
--Anatole Broyard, New York Times
--William H. Pritchard, New Republic
--Roger Caldwell, Literary Review [UK]
--A. O. Scott, The Nation
--Denis Donoghue, New York Review of Books
--John Boening, World Literature TodayPhoto of Helen Vendler: Mary Lee