Helen Vendler

Helen Vendler (April 30, 1933 – April 23, 2024) was an American academic, writer and literary critic. Quotes "A Life of Learning" (2001) "A Life of Learning", Charles Homer Haskins lecture, American Council of Learned Societies (2001) My energy was flagging, and I had no money for child care or household help. One night, exhausted, I tried to think how to make my life easier. I obviously had to continue teaching and keeping house and taking care of my young son. The only way I could make my life easier was to give up writing. "They can't make me," I said to myself in panic and fear and rage, "They can't make me do that." I suppose "They" were the Fates, or the Stars; but I knew that to stop writing would be a form of self-murder. ... I envied my male colleagues who, in those days, seemed to have everything done for them by their spouses. Marjorie Nicholson's essay saying that what women scholars needed was wives never seemed truer. The choice of a single genre as a field of expertise is still hardly acknowledged in job advertisements, yet how many scholars or critics can teach all the genres equally well? The fundamentally different structures of literature-linear in narrative, dialectic in drama, and concentric in lyric-and the historical failures (except in unusual cases) of great poets to write workable plays or novels (or great novelists to write memorable lyrics) suggest basic incompatibilities among the genres. I only once, in want of money, agreed to review a novel (Mary McCarthy's Birds ofAmerica for The New York Times Book Review); and although I don't think the review was mistaken, I felt such guilt at falsifying my competence that I never again consented to write on fiction. I'm a critic rather than a scholar, a reader and writer more taken by texts than by contexts. From the time I was very young I continually asked myself, as I read through the works of poets, why some texts seemed so much more accomplished and moving than others. Why was Milton's "L'Allegro" more satisfactory than his "On the Death of a fair Infant dying of a Cough?" I believed, and still do, that anyone literate in poetry could see that the one was superior to the other. (Those who suppose there are no criteria for such judgments merely expose their own incapacity.) The presumption of commentary, from the first classical commentaries down to our day, is that literary works are complex enough in thought and style to solicit detailed intellectual reflection. The young respond to poetry for the same reason I did at their age: poems tell complex truths of human response, and they structure words with particular force, wit, charm, intellectual responsibility, and plangency. External links Category:1933 births Category:2024 deaths Category:Women born in the 1930s Category:Women academics from the United States Category:Women authors from the United States Category:Literary critics Category:Non-fiction authors from the United States Category:Members of the American Philosophical Society Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Harvard University faculty Category:University of Cambridge faculty Category:Cornell University faculty Category:Smith College faculty Category:People from Boston