Collected Links to Articles by Helen Vendler

Collected Links to Articles by Helen Vendler

Strangely, there is not yet a clearing-house of links to articles accessible on the web by the critic Helen Vendler. Much of her criticism is in print in various collections, but much is still uncollected, and many valuable articles are on the web but presumably not to be reprinted. This page is grouped roughly into three sections: articles on particular poets, on the practice of poetry criticism, and on more general themes such as education. Perhaps the most valuable of the links fall in the final section, as these cannot be found in books -- while much of Vendler's criticism from the 80s and 90s is now in book form from places like the Harvard University Press.

I had started to collect also webpages about Professor Vendler's work; there is a great deal of it, however, and much of it is of dubious value, being largely polemical, rather than analytical, in form.

Unfortunately, the New York Review of Books, where Vendler has published a great deal of work, charges $4 per article for access to old articles. You can find her NYRB "author page" here, and, if you so chose, purchase articles after reading the introductory paragraph. One hopes that the NYRB will rationalize its purchasing system to allow cheaper access.

The London Review of Books now appears to have a similar policy, and you may find Vendler's page at the LRB here. LRB access is given to all print subscribers; right now American readers may subscribe for a greatly reduced price relative to the European charge.

This is a far from complete anthology consisting only of free, web accessible articles. It is not a bibliography. Sadly, more and more publications are putting their archives behind firewalls, and demanding payment, and so this page will be incomplete at best.

I would appriciate very much hearing of any articles I might have missed. You may reach me at simon [at] astro.princeton.edu, substituting, as usual @ for [at].

Reviews of particular poets

Wallace Stevens: Hypotheses and Contradictions (extract from the Warton Lecture on English Poetry, printed in the British Academy Review, 2000)
The Unburied Life: On Matthew Arnold (The New Republic, 1999)
On Dove's Poetics (extracts)
Yeats (RealAudio from the endearingly ridiculous Christopher Lydon, on NPR's Connection.)
The allegories and mimicries of Mark Ford (TLS article, 2000)
Chapter One of The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (at the NYT site; free registration.)
Hamlet is the best poem of the millenium (the old one; provenance unknown; Google cache.)
"Desolation Shading Into Terror": W. S. Merwin (NYT 1998, served by UIUC, a clearing-house, it seems, of copyright violation.)

On Criticism

I. A. Richards at Harvard (The Boston Review, 1981)
Poetry Criticism: What is it for? (Good question; from a PSA sponsored conference with Marjorie Perloff and Vendler participating.)

General Themes

"Ups and Downs with Harvard" (Harvard Magazine, 2001)
A Life of Learning (ACLS lecture, 2001)
A New Way of Being (Radcliffe Quarterly, Interview, 2000)
Interview (Artistic Eye Review, no date, Google cache)