I have always enjoyed Helen Vendler’s criticism. Her work has the curious effect of demonstrating a quality we do not typically allow critics: virtuosity. She simply takes the basic act of literary criticism, and performs it with great skill and obvious pleasure. Not only a powerful interpreter of poems, Vendler also enthusiastically evangelizes for poetry and what it offers us, here at the end of all things. At one level, she is to poetry what Michael Dirda is to novels – an enthusiastic and omnivorous appreciator. That said, she more frequently provides close readings, and these have rightly earned her the critical bona fides she enjoys today.
In the 2004 Jefferson lecture, given in May in Washington D.C., Ms. Vendler takes as her departure point three poems by Wallace Stevens. From here, she argues why the arts, and the study of the arts matter. According to Ms. Vendler, a structured study of the humanities (as opposed to immersion in poems, novels, symphonies, ballet, and art) serves a vital function: it acts as a mediator for our cultural inheritances (patrimony as Vendler describes it) and our physical world. This functions analogous to arts own capacity to structure (mediate) experience and the physical world through aesthetics. The consequence of neglect of art or criticism is to become, as Vendler so aptly describes it, a “sleepwalker” in the world.
