Helen Vendler About Walt Whitman
I had always been disappointed that Helen Vendler, a wonderful writer about poetry, did not use a more conversational voice in her book about Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which is linked in the navigation column on this page.
Her writing over the years for the NYRB was always accessible, without the lingo of academia, which often obscures more than reveals. Her deep understanding of the mechanics, and she would probably argue, further appreciation therefore of the value of what she discusses, wasn’t for me a great read.
But she is a subtle thinker, an insightful critic, and no small issue, has her own value system which won’t be subsumed to fashion. So even the Shakespeare book had great interest.
In this NYT review of a book by a poet filled with enthusiasm for his subject, Walt Whitman, Vendler once again offers sharp and helpful remarks (the poet C.K. Williams is Vendler’s reference),
Although Williams calls him “compulsively gregarious,” Whitman could hardly have composed his monumental poems without spending a good deal of his time not being gregarious, but rather sitting, thinking, reading, writing, revising.
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Williams knows that the real meat and drink in Whitman’s work lies in the poet’s unprecedented assembling of rhythm, sound, language and images.
But in the end, for Williams, the didactic trumps the aesthetic: we are brought back to the poetry’s moral demand that we be “greater than we are.”
This, however, cannot be the purpose of poetry, which necessarily subsumes even the ethical under whatever it has set up as the aesthetic law governing a particular construction. Ethics — like landscape, or anecdote, or history, or psychology — is part of the raw material of some (but not all) poetry. Like other ingredients it plays a necessarily subordinate part.
Wonderfully said, Helen Vendler. What Vendler calls, “the aesthetic law governing a particular construction,” is what I would call the poet’s sense of the world and ability to express that overriding sense; to weave it into meaning that is felt.
