The knives are out again for Helen Vendler. In a recent review for The Spectator, Daniel Swift accuses the poetry critic of performing a bloodless “scientific evaluation of literature.” Her formalism, Swift writes, is actually a misguided appeal to “objectivity” that “causes her to sound highly technical” and obtuse. She must resort, he argues, to such terms as “Miltonic volta” and “mass synecdoche” to get her point across. For those who disagree with her, she offers “condescending waffle”—this is waffle in a chiefly British sense: “lengthy but trivial or useless talk” (OED)—to put her detractors in their place. The review takes aim at Vendler’s latest collection, The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poetry and Poets (Harvard, 2015), but Swift sounds pretty anti-Vendler, regardless of the work. It’s worth noting that Vendler didn’t like Swift’s introduction to John Berryman’s The Heart Is Strange: New Selected Poems (2014). She said as much in the June 4, 2015 issue of the New York Review of Books. Swift acknowledges that a personal grievance triggered his review. An edited version of that Berryman piece closes out The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar.
I want to get to why this grumbly, axe-grinding, British review of Vendler relates to two trends I see now in American poetry—the confusion over the critic’s role and the rise of literary teams—but first, the question that’s probably foremost on your mind: does Daniel Swift have a case? Not really. The Heart Is Strange is, as Vendler writes, unnecessary and flawed. Swift confuses the form used in Berryman’s early “Nervous Songs” for that of The Dream Songs, then fails to include any Dream Songs in the book. A “reader ordering the book online,” Vendler notes, would have every reason to “feel deceived.” That reader must buy one of two more Berryman reissues—one edited by Henri Cole ($15), the other by Michael Hofmann ($19)—to find those justly famous poems. Swift’s book is one of four released for Berryman’s 100th birthday, and it sells for $26. (April Bernard’s edition of Berryman’s Sonnets goes for another $15.) Berryman, Swift writes, “saw birthdays as imaginative opportunities” (ix). FSG sees them as a chance to rake in the cash. The Heart is Strange does provide some useful material—an unpublished children’s poem, a few paragraphs on indie rocker and JB—but what’s really needed is a scholarly edition, or (barring that) a Complete Poems like Bidart and Gewanter’s edition of Lowell.
But what of his charge that Vendler applies a misguided form of “scientific evaluation” to poems? Is this an attack on formalism or a disbelief that one can discern between good and bad poems? Both, it seems, but Swift doesn’t make much of a case for either. Words like “synecdoche” and “volta” are standard critical terms. They’re also easy to define. He points to very few readings from The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar that he thinks are reductively scientific, though he repeats Vendler’s criticism of him: “never does the histrionic Berryman sound at all like […] George Herbert.” (Swift thinks he does, but doesn’t cite any lines, in that book or this review, to show why he’s right.) In lieu of textual evidence, Swift leads with leading questions: “[i]s it possible to tell a good poem from a bad one? To put the question another way: are there objective, even scientific, standards for evaluating literature?” This strikes me as a false parallel. We can certainly differentiate between good and bad poems without assuming our criterion for doing are “scientific” (i.e. not open to debate). Given that Swift makes so little reference to Vendler’s actual points, one wonders what he made of her title essay. In it, she argues that America needs to balance its successes in “the natural sciences” (26) with an investment in the “sensuous responsiveness” of the humanities, scholarship included (24). Her readings are like all other readings: they may not “outlast the generation” (23).
So: why does Swift’s piece matter in the States? There’s the fact that the Poetry Foundation posted it on its Harriet blog, gleefully noting that Vendler “has been taken down a peg or two.” Poetry Daily retweeted this post without comment. Neither gesture amounts to much, though the first seems like an extension of (or desire to continue) an earlier Vendler controversy: the debate over Rita Dove’s The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry (2011). That episode—described variously as a “smackdown,” “knockdown,” and clash of “credentials” (The Atlantic)—consumed the poetry world for the better part of two months. It even managed to reach NPR. At its heart was (again) a critical review written in the NYRB. Vendler didn’t think Dove’s anthology accurately represented the best poetry of the 20th century. There were too many poets (175 in fact); too great a deference to diverse voices (six pages for Wallace Stevens, 14 for Melvin Tolson); and a shoddily argued defense of her choices (Dove: “I have tried my best”). Dove replied in a 1700 word letter to the editor, accusing Vendler of “barely veiled racism.” Later, Dove would go further, quoting a letter from her husband that compared Helen Vendler to Nazis and the Klan.
I do not wish to reargue one or another side of this dust-up—I’d concur with my KR colleague Amit Majmudar: the book is “a personal anthology with a scholarly title”—but I would like to note the similarities in the responses of Dove and Swift. Both look to avenge themselves of a critical slight. Both do so after being criticized for failing their own critical duties. Both respond in anger, attacking the critic herself (Dove more so than Swift), even if they have legitimate claims. The sides, in short, do not speak the same language. This, I’ve come to believe, is often the case when American critics and poets meet on the few critical grounds that they still share: introductions, anthologies, selected works. Critics believe you ought to make a claim and support it. If your claim feels thin, another critic can step in and tell you why. That’s their job. As Cynthia Haven reminds us, having read Dove’s intro, we’ve “all written hastily, sloppily” but “that’s exactly what critics are for: to spank us when we do.” And yet it’s this entry into the Burkean parlor—where one must state a claim and defend it—that so many poets seem adverse to make. “I am proud that no principle of selection emerges [for my anthology],” Dove writes in her letter to NYRB. It is a sentence that no critic would ever dare to write.
It’s worth noting, of course, that Daniel Swift is not an American poet. He’s a British memoirist who’s written fascinatingly about his poet-pilot grandfather disappearing over the North Atlantic in 1943. Still, his response to Vendler and its subsequent reposting on Poetry remind me of some pro-Dove cri de cœurs from 2012: personal, aggrieved, lacking textual evidence, mean. Whatever traction his opinion gains here will follow in those same grooves. This begs the question: why do poets and critics in the US have such different views of the critic’s role? Where does the divide—on what qualifies as evidence and counter-argument—begin? As an American poet who struggled to transition from poetry culture to the critical discourse of a PhD, I’ve spent five years now considering that question from both sides. I think I’ve come to a provisional answer. The MFA accounts for part of the problem, but not in the usual, declinist way we’re so accustomed to hearing. That poets rely on feelings to write poems, but must rely on their intellect to argue, is another factor too, but again only partial. (Dove is an intellectually challenging poet with a legitimately revisionist approach to the canon. Still, her NYRB rebuttal is thin and ad hominem.) The real reason, I think, is more insidious and culturally prevalent: the rise of literary teams.
Like most Americans today, poets are asked to make affiliations. Their undergraduate mentors constitute an early alliance. Their MFA program forms another. Likewise any fellowships that follow. Ditto the press that takes their first book. Throughout it all, however, there’s the steady reassurance that their identity, whatever part of the fractious poetry world they come from, is not critical. That’s for those other grad students and faculty on the other side of the department: the folks attending seminars, writing papers, and worrying their days away in the stacks. Poets may be smart, even intellectually rigorous, but they’re rarely expected to consider counterarguments with poise. This was an inevitable outcome when they first entered the university system, under the auspices of a creative degree, after WWII. Some 70 years later, it’s de rigueur. A poet attending a workshop today may or may not regard herself as a member of Team Creative Writing, but it’s inevitable that someone sitting beside her will. Meanwhile, the work of Team Criticism goes on, distant and other. Poets engage in it during literature surveys and hear it discussed in the hallway, but more so than ever they can construe their writing as apart from and not a compliment to criticism’s goals.
I may be overstating my case a bit, as any claim about all of American poetry will do. Still, this feels like a real problem in our literary culture, and one made more urgent when opinions go live with a click. Which brings me back to Helen Vendler and any seconding of Swift’s attack by poets in the States. Not only does his argument lack evidence, it misconstrues Vendler’s work. If Helen Vendler plays for anyone, it is Team Creative Writing. She engages a poem in the same way poets in workshop discuss drafts: by parsing what’s on the page. She reads deeply into similes, sounds, and form. Formalism is not, as Daniel Swift argues, a reductively “objective” lens, but one approach (among many) for how to read a poem. It’s also the coin of the realm in the creative writing world. I discovered as much when I returned to graduate school after years of teaching creative writing. To read closely like Cleanth Brooks is largely passé. (Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading, where a critic employs digital tools to map literary trends, is much more in vogue.) This is what worries me then about Poetry’s swipe at Vendler (“taken down a peg or two”). I’m worried that she’s becoming a synecdoche—to use a word Swift so objects to—for Team Criticism. There ought not to be any Teams, of course, but Vendler’s an odd choice to captain the “opposition.” More than most critics, she and the poet share a box of tools.
“Poetry is the scholar’s art,” Wallace Stevens once wrote. It is a line that Vendler approvingly quotes in The Ocean, The Bird, and the Scholar, and one that we’d all do well to keep in mind. Whether we like her work or not, Helen Vendler writes smartly about poetry, a notoriously difficult art, siding time and again with other readers who—like her—simply want to learn. Sometimes this involves warning them about books that she believes are misleadingly titled. Thus her criticism of Dove’s anthology, Swift’s Selected, and Alice Quinn’s edition of Bishop’s Uncollected Poems (2006). This, of course, is the least we ask of critics: to read beyond the blurbs and promotional pablum; to report back before we invest time and money in a book. In her scholarly volumes, she’s similarly keen to offer aid. Her most popular, recent volumes offer browsable commentary on favorite lyrics: The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1999) and Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries (2010). Her monographs are deliciously framed (see her take on direct address: Invisible Listeners). Whichever of her arguments we may object to, it is our job—as poets or critics—to disagree dispassionately, citing evidence for our claims.