Helen Vendler Quotes

#1. For the critic, criticism is a form of natural self-expression, as poetry is to the poet. So, for a critic, criticism is a true thing. Criticism isn't written for poets, it's written for other readers. One hopes it is true for other readers if it's true for oneself.

Helen Vendler

#2. I wouldn't be very happy if a poet read what I had written and said, 'What a peculiar thing to say about this work of mine.'

Helen Vendler

#3. All good poets of the past, almost without exception, were at least bilingual if not trilingual.

Helen Vendler

#4. A poem needs imaginative rhythms as well as imaginative transformation of content.

Helen Vendler

#5. I believe that poems are a score for performance by the reader, and that you become the speaking voice. You don't read or overhear the voice in the poem - you are the voice in the poem.

Helen Vendler

#6. Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.

Helen Vendler

#7. If you like the precision and concision of poetry, a page of prose is unsatisfying in a certain way. And poetry is so direct.

Helen Vendler

#8. The art of utterance persuades initially by its music and its rhythm, before semiotic or personal characteristics come into play.

Helen Vendler

#9. When I first heard Wallace Stevens' voice, it was by chance: a friend wanted to listen to the recording he had made for the Harvard Vocarium Series.

Helen Vendler

#10. Without play at many levels of language, from phonemes to logical structures, a poem is merely prose with linebreaks added.

Helen Vendler

#11. One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways.

Helen Vendler

#12. In the final analysis, it is not critics who create literary canons, it is other writers who create them ... A writer can have published thirty-seven volumes, but if that writer doesn't interest other writers, they will all molder in the library and nobody will ever want to read them again.

Helen Vendler

#13. I do not give the honorific name of 'poetry' to the primitive and the unaccomplished.

Helen Vendler

#14. I would like to spend more time with Spanish poetry. I know French better than Spanish, but Spanish was my first language, and my father spoke it to us.

Helen Vendler

#15. I liked teaching Henry James. When you look down at a Henry James novel from a helicopter height, you find an intricate spider web that all clings together.

Helen Vendler

#16. The non-artists among us are always terribly busy, but finally disappear without a trace.

Helen Vendler

#17. I like art history and art criticism. Leo Steinberg has always been my favorite. He's very original, very accurate and acute.

Helen Vendler

#18. Each poem leads you to the questions it makes sense to ask it.

Helen Vendler

#19. Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity.

Helen Vendler

#20. There are not many poets whose fame rests on a single work.

Helen Vendler

#21. I was unnerved to learn in my twenties that the poems of Emily Dickinson that I had memorized as a girl were not the poems as she had written them.

Helen Vendler

#22. I always write after I think for quite a long time, so the actual writing time is rather short. I think a lot of the work gets done when you have something on your mind while you're doing many other things.

Helen Vendler