The Review: Remembering the great Helen Vendler

Plus: More on academic freedom and discrimination. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( You can also [read this newsletter on the web](. Or, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, [unsubscribe](. A couple of years ago, I tried to assign a profile of the great poetry critic Helen Vendler, who died last week, at 90. The profile didn’t work out, because Vendler wouldn’t agree to more than a 10-minute Zoom meeting with the freelancer hoping to write the piece. (For a profile of this sort, the author would typically spend considerable time with the subject, in person if possible.) “I’m very old,” she said; “I need to save my energy for my writing.” And she did — Vendler in her final years wrote for the quarterly Liberties essay after shimmering essay: on Gerard Manley Hopkins, on Ocean Vuong, on Sylvia Plath, on Robert Hayden, on Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson, on William Cowper and William Blake and W.B. Yeats, and, in her last published essay, which appeared less than a month before her death, on Walt Whitman’s war poetry and PTSD. However weakened in body by the cancer that killed her, Vendler in her last half decade produced a closing corpus testament to a mind not just intact but fully agile. Although she was the closest of close readers — “There isn’t anyone in the country who can read syntax in poems as well as she can,” Harold Bloom said of her — Vendler could also on occasion be a disarmingly personal critic, even confessional. In a 1990 Yale Review [essay]( on T.S. Eliot, she describes her teenage encounter with The Waste Land: “It suited exactly my adolescent expectation of what poetry should be: rich, tragic, learned, hopeless, and musical.” More: “The poem matched, very exactly and assuagingly, my own recurring adolescent wish to die.” She begins her Liberties [essay]( on Sylvia Plath’s “Morning Song” this way: “When my son was born, I was shocked to realize that among all the poems I knew, hardly any were about a baby or about becoming a mother.” Lines of Adrienne Rich’s — “For to be young / Was always to live in other people’s houses” — [taught]( Vendler, at 23, “what I was — a provincial girl in a house constituted by persons so alien to me that they were in effect ‘other people.’” (My sense, not scientifically verified, is that these asides are more common in the essays of Vendler’s last years.) That poetry was “incredibly personal” for Vendler became clear to Celeste Marcus, Liberties’s managing editor, during the time that they worked together. “When Helen was living through difficult periods,” Marcus told me, “there were certain lines that she would just not be able to stop thinking, not because she was trying to conjure them; they would just insert themselves into her mind.” I asked Marcus what editing Vendler was like. “She was a perfectionist,” she said. Vendler preferred to review edits by phone; Marcus recalls long conversations that would move from the essay at hand to more general matters: “We would just talk about life. She had profound and idiosyncratic and complicated views about the world, about women especially. I was always very moved by how forthcoming she was about her own life.” And she was generous, too — Vendler read Marcus’s own drafts, and made them better. “If she thought that I didn’t prove something, she would tell me.” One of Vendler’s last essays, “[Forced to a Smile]( is about, among other things, epitaphs. Although it contains no first-person asides, no ruminations on her own mortality, its personal undertow is unmistakable. Its chief object is the 18th-century poet William Cowper’s “[Epitaph on a Hare]( which “shines in its humor and its sadness.” The poem memorializes a pet, a wild hare named Tiney, “surliest of his kind,” whom Cowper nonetheless loved: I kept him for his humor’s sake, For he would oft beguile My heart of thoughts that made it ache, And force me to a smile. Vendler reads the poem as a masterpiece of “charm,” a “beguiling” aesthetic effect which her essay analyzes at length (other charming poets, she says, include James Merrill and A.R. Ammons). The trick of Cowper’s epitaph is to so wield charm as to sneak up, sideways, on the enormous topics of grief and death. “If the poem is to ring true,” Vendler writes, “the death’s head must be glimpsed.” Read Helen Vendler’s Liberties essays [here]( a selection of her London Review of Books essays [here]( and her New York Review of Books essays [here](. SPECIAL OFFER FOR NEW SUBSCRIBERS Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for as low as $59. Take advantage of our limited- time savings event and get unlimited access to essential reporting, data, and analysis. SPONSOR CONTENT | Thomas Jefferson University [Impacting Society Through Innovation]( Katherine Franke and Protected Speech Last week, I [wrote]( that Columbia law professor Katherine Franke’s statements on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now about Israeli students were probably not protected by academic freedom. I heard from several of you who disagreed. Was I wrong? Here is the fuller quotation: We have a — Columbia has a program. It’s a graduate relationship with older students from other countries, including Israel. And it’s something that many of us were concerned about, because so many of those Israeli students, who then come to the Columbia campus, are coming right out of their military service. And they’ve been known to harass Palestinian and other students on our campus. And it’s something the university has not taken seriously in the past. To my ear, Franke’s language seemed to suggest that Israeli adult students as such — Israelis qua Israelis — are a suspect class, given over for reasons of background and national identity to abusing and harassing their fellow students. Couldn’t that contribute to a discriminatory environment on campus? I asked Zach Greenberg, a lawyer at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, what he thought. He told me that, in context, Franke’s speech on Democracy Now struck him as protected. And by itself, he said, it shouldn’t warrant the [investigation]( into “discriminatory remarks” that is apparently underway. On the other hand, it could be used as one piece of evidence if a larger case were being built that Columbia harbors discrimination. But on its own, it’s probably kosher. ADVERTISEMENT UPCOMING PROGRAM [The Chronicle's Strategic-Leadership Program for Department Chairs | June 2024] [Join us in June]( for a professional development program tailored to the needs of department chairs. Experienced academic leaders will provide insights on the the current trends in higher ed, effective ways to manage a department, strategic planning, and more. [Register today!]( The Latest THE REVIEW | ESSAY [Happy Birthday, Kant!]( By Michael S. Roth [STORY IMAGE]( The great philosopher was also a great theorist of education. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW | OPINION [Elise Stefanik, Dean of Faculty]( By David A. 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It’s a response to the undemocratic university. Recommended - “Mizrahim tend to perceive the Israeli left — in so far it still exists, at all — as elitist and primarily for the Ashkenazim, who have formed the social elite since the formation of the state.” For his Substack, John Ganz has an informative brief [history]( of “race and ethnicity in Israeli society.” - “There is a kind of respect for the college campus despite all the mockery it receives here.” That’s Boris Dralyuk discussing Vladimir Nabokov’s campus novel Pnin with Jennifer Frey on Frey’s [podcast]( “Sacred and Profane Love.” - “The hour generally is late in Eisenman’s pictorial world, the palette prevailingly fuscous.” In the New York Review of Books, Julian Bell [writes about]( the artist Nicole Eisenman. Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin SPONSOR CONTENT | Vital Source [Understanding the Impact of AI on Student Learning]( Explore how AI-generated questions are reshaping educational practices and fostering student engagement. FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [The Future of Diversity Training - The Chronicle Store]( [The Future of Diversity Training]( Diversity training for faculty and staff members is widely used across higher education. Yet there’s little agreement on whether such training is effective. [Order this report]( for insights to improve your college’s approach to building a culture that supports diversity. JOB OPPORTUNITIES [Search jobs on The Chronicle job board]( [Find Your Next Role Today]( Whether you are actively or passively searching for your next career opportunity, The Chronicle is here to support you throughout your job search. Get started now by [exploring 30,000+ openings]( or [signing up for job alerts](. 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