Helen Vendler Quotations

I like art history and art criticism. Leo Steinberg has always been my favorite. Hes very original, very accurate and acute.

I think that a lot of things are hard to read if you're not in the vocabulary flow of that particular discourse. I sometimes forget that even though the words I'm using are fairly ordinary words, the concepts around which they cluster, which are the long concepts of literary tradition, may not be familiar to an audience.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.'

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity.

For the mind and the imagination, bookstores aren't enough, college courses aren't enough, the Internet isn't enough. Those resources are all governed by the tastes and needs of the moment. Only libraries take the long view, quietly shelving the unused with the used, knowing that one of these days the two categories will be reversed by a student's discovery of those hitherto undisturbed volumes whose contents will unsettle the learned world.

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.

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

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

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

You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem, you are the voice in the poem.