When Poetry Could Define a Life

From the 1970s through the 2000s, Marjorie Perloff and Helen Vendler were regularly mentioned together as America’s leading interpreters of poetry. When a 2000 article in Poets & Writers referred jokingly to a “Vendler-Perloff standoff,” Perloff objected to the habitual comparison. “Helen Vendler and I have extraordinarily different views on contemporary poetry and different critical methodologies, but we are assumed to be affiliated because we are both women critics of a certain age in a male-dominated field,” she wrote in 1999.

Now fate has paired them again: Perloff’s death in late March, at age 92, was followed last week by Vendler’s at age 90. Both remained active to the very end: Perloff wrote the introduction to a new edition of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published this year, and the current issue of the journal Liberties includes an essay by Vendler on war and PTSD in poetry. But for many poets and readers of poetry, the loss of these towering scholars and critics feels like the definitive end of an era that has been slowly passing for years. In our more populist time, when poetry has won big new audiences by becoming more accessible and more engaged with issues of identity, Vendler and Perloff look like either remote elitists or the last champions of aesthetic complexity, depending on your point of view.

Age and gender may have played a role in their frequent pairing, as Perloff suspected, but it was their different outlooks as critics that made them such perfect foils. They stood for opposite ways of thinking about the art of poetry—how to write it, how to read it, what kind of meaning and pleasure to expect from it.

Vendler was a traditionalist, championing poets who communicated intimate thoughts and emotions in beautiful, complex language. As a scholar, she focused on clarifying the mechanics of that artistry. Her magnum opus, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, is a feat of “close reading,” examining the 154 poems word by word to wring every drop of meaning from them. In analyzing “Sonnet 23,” for instance, she highlights the 11 appearances of the letter l in the last six lines, arguing that these “liquid repeated” letters are “signs of passion.”

For Vendler, poetic form was not just a display of virtuosity, but a way of making language more meaningful. As she wrote in the introduction to her anthology Poems, Poets, Poetry (named for the popular introductory class she taught for many years at Harvard), the lyric poem is “the most intimate of genres,” whose purpose is to let us “into the innermost chamber of another person’s mind.” To achieve that kind of intimacy, the best poets use all the resources of language—not just the meaning of words, but their sounds, rhythms, patterns, and etymological connections.

Perloff, by contrast, championed poetry that defied the very notion of communication. She was drawn to the avant-garde tradition in modernist literature, which she described in her book Radical Artifice as “eccentric in its syntax, obscure in its language, and mathematical rather than musical in its form.” She found this kind of spiky intelligence in John Ashbery, John Cage, and the late-20th-century school known as Language poetry, which drew attention to the artificiality of language by using it in strange and nonsensical ways. One of her favorite poets was Charles Bernstein, whose poem “A Test of Poetry” begins:

What do you mean by rashes of ash? Is industry

systematic work, assiduous activity, or ownership
of factories? Is ripple agitate lightly? Are
we tossed in tune when we write poems?

For Perloff, the difficulty of this kind of poem had a political edge. At a time when television and advertising were making words smooth and empty, she argued that poets had a moral duty to resist by using language disruptively, forcing readers to sit up and pay attention. “Poetic discourse,” she wrote, “defines itself as that which can violate the system.”

For Vendlerites, Perloff’s approach to poetry could seem excessively theoretical and intellectual; for Perloffians, Vendler’s taste could seem too conventional. (Perloff wrote that when her “poet friends … really want to put me down, they say that I’m not so different from Helen Vendler!”) Vendler’s scholarly books explored canonical poets such as Wallace Stevens, W. B. Yeats, and Robert Lowell; Perloff’s focused on edgier figures such as Gertrude Stein and the French Oulipo group, which experimented with artificial constraints on writing, such as avoiding the letter e. When it came to living poets, Vendler’s favorites tended to win literary prizes—Pulitzers, National Book Awards, and, in the case of her friend and colleague Seamus Heaney, the Nobel. Perloff’s seldom did, finding admiration inside the academy instead.

These differences in taste can be seen as a reflection of the critics’ very different backgrounds. Vendler was born in Boston and attended Catholic schools and a Catholic college before earning a doctorate from Harvard. She went on to teach for 20 years at Boston University and then returned to Harvard as a star faculty member. She spoke about the open sexism she initially encountered in the Ivy League, but she was a product of that milieu and eventually triumphed in it.

Perloff was born to a Jewish family in Vienna and came to New York in 1938 as a 6-year-old refugee from Nazism. (In her memoir, The Vienna Paradox, she wrote that she exchanged her original name, Gabrielle, for Marjorie because she thought it sounded more American.) She earned her Ph.D. from Catholic University, in Washington, D.C., and spent most of her academic career in California, at the opposite corner of the country from the Ivy League and its traditions. Perloff’s understanding of high art as a tool for disrupting mass culture unites her with thinkers of the Frankfurt School such as Theodor Adorno—German Jewish émigrés of an older generation, many of whom also ended up in California.

In his poem “Little Gidding,” written during World War II, T. S. Eliot wrote that the Cavaliers and Puritans who fought in England’s Civil War, in the 17th century, now “are folded in a single party.” The same already seems true of Vendler and Perloff. Today college students are fleeing humanities majors, and English departments are desperately trying to lure them back by promoting the ephemera of pop culture as worthy subjects of study. (Vendler’s own Harvard English department has been getting a great deal of attention for offering a class on Taylor Swift.) Both Vendler and Perloff, by contrast, rejected the idea that poetry had to earn its place in the curriculum, or in the culture at large, by being “relevant.” Nor did it have to be defended on the grounds that it makes us more virtuous citizens or more employable technicians of reading and writing.

Rather, they believed that studying poetry was valuable in and of itself. In her 2004 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities, Vendler argued that art, not history or theory, should be the center of a humanistic education, because “artworks embody the individuality that fades into insignificance in the massive canvas of history.” Perloff made a similar argument in her 1999 essay “In Defense of Poetry,” where she criticized the dominance of cultural studies in academia and called for “making the arts, rather than history, the umbrella of choice” in studying the humanities.

There are no obvious heirs to Vendler and Perloff in American poetry today. Given the trend lines for the humanities, it seems unlikely that we will see a similar conjunction of scholarly authority and critical discernment anytime soon. But that is all the more reason for them to be remembered—together, for all their differences—as examples of how literary criticism, when practiced as a true vocation, can be one of the most exciting expressions of the life of the mind.