Helen Vendler Quotes & Sayings

I liked teaching Henry James. When you look down at a Henry James novel from a helicopter height, you find an intricate spider web that all clings together. — Helen Vendler

I was unnerved to learn in my twenties that the poems of Emily Dickinson that I had memorized as a girl were not the poems as she had written them. — Helen Vendler

I do not give the honorific name of 'poetry' to the primitive and the unaccomplished. — Helen Vendler

Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity. — Helen Vendler

I like art history and art criticism. Leo Steinberg has always been my favorite. He's very original, very accurate and acute. — Helen Vendler

Without play at many levels of language, from phonemes to logical structures, a poem is merely prose with linebreaks added. — Helen Vendler

I always write after I think for quite a long time, so the actual writing time is rather short. I think a lot of the work gets done when you have something on your mind while you're doing many other things. — Helen Vendler

I think that a lot of things are hard to read if you're not in the vocabulary flow of that particular discourse. I sometimes forget that even though the words I'm using are fairly ordinary words, the concepts around which they cluster, which are the long concepts of literary tradition, may not be familiar to an audience. — Helen Vendler

I wouldn't be very happy if a poet read what I had written and said, 'What a peculiar thing to say about this work of mine.' — Helen Vendler

Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature. — Helen Vendler

A poem needs imaginative rhythms as well as imaginative transformation of content. — Helen Vendler

For the critic, criticism is a form of natural self-expression, as poetry is to the poet. So, for a critic, criticism is a true thing. Criticism isn't written for poets, it's written for other readers. One hopes it is true for other readers if it's true for oneself. — Helen Vendler

The art of utterance persuades initially by its music and its rhythm, before semiotic or personal characteristics come into play. — Helen Vendler

If you like the precision and concision of poetry, a page of prose is unsatisfying in a certain way. And poetry is so direct. — Helen Vendler

I would like to spend more time with Spanish poetry. I know French better than Spanish, but Spanish was my first language, and my father spoke it to us. — Helen Vendler

One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways. — Helen Vendler

For the mind and the imagination, bookstores aren't enough, college courses aren't enough, the Internet isn't enough. Those resources are all governed by the tastes and needs of the moment. Only libraries take the long view, quietly shelving the unused with the used, knowing that one of these days the two categories will be reversed by a student's discovery of those hitherto undisturbed volumes whose contents will unsettle the learned world. — Helen Vendler

The non-artists among us are always terribly busy, but finally disappear without a trace. — Helen Vendler

There are not many poets whose fame rests on a single work. — Helen Vendler

All good poets of the past, almost without exception, were at least bilingual if not trilingual. — Helen Vendler

I believe that poems are a score for performance by the reader, and that you become the speaking voice. You don't read or overhear the voice in the poem - you are the voice in the poem. — Helen Vendler

When I first heard Wallace Stevens' voice, it was by chance: a friend wanted to listen to the recording he had made for the Harvard Vocarium Series. — Helen Vendler

Each poem leads you to the questions it makes sense to ask it. — Helen Vendler

In the final analysis, it is not critics who create literary canons, it is other writers who create them ... A writer can have published thirty-seven volumes, but if that writer doesn't interest other writers, they will all molder in the library and nobody will ever want to read them again. — Helen Vendler