Helen Vendler (1933–2024) was a leading poetry critic and the author of nineteen books on poets from William Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney. A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, she contributed regularly to the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, and the New Republic. She was the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.
Ms. Vendler’s Seamus Heaney serves as a wonderfully succinct road
map to the poet’s verse, illuminating the effect that both private
and public events have had on the development of his work, while
explicating the continual evolution of his style. She shows us how
Mr. Heaney has pushed the boundaries of the traditional lyric poem
in his efforts to articulate his changing vision of the world, even
as she helps us to understand his masterly use of sound, symbol,
imagery and parable.
*New York Times*
[Helen Vendler’s] reading of Heaney is a marvelously illuminating
achievement… Most magically of all, [this book] manages, while
rejecting engagement on the ’thematic’ level, to be constantly
stimulating towards other readings while it entertains.
*Essays in Criticism*
It is perhaps the subject of Northern Ireland that has primarily
been responsible for attracting a large audience to Heaney’s work.
In her comprehensive and passionate new book, Seamus Heaney, the
critic Helen Vendler reminds us, however, that ’thematic elements
do not by themselves make for memorable poetry.’ Instead,
Vendler…deals chiefly with Heaney’s craft, including his poetic
inventiveness and ongoing experimentation with form and expression…
[Vendler] has asserted that while a poet is inextricably connected
to certain struggles, it is the ability to find new approaches to
language to convey those struggles that determines his or her
genius. And Vendler’s survey of 11 books of poetry…clearly makes
the case that Heaney has sustained such attention to language,
often brilliantly bringing to light his thematic , aesthetic and
moral concerns… As Vendler shows, symbol-making is only part of
Heaney’s excellence. She stresses the masterful formal designs that
convey these symbols throughout the decades of Heaney’s lyrics… One
finishes her book with a remarkably clear understanding of Heaney’s
outstanding adventures in form and expression, and of poetry
itself. If it’s true, as I believe it is, that only a few poets
each century actually change the way we understand the
possibilities of our language, then Heaney has earned his place as
one of those. Most important, however, one finishes Vendler’s
critical study more inspired to return to Heaney’s masterful,
rigorous and deeply moving poems, which are in love with listening,
life and the life of language.
*Newsday*
Vendler comments with the energy of one who has learned great
sensitivity for both the work and the workers described in Heaney’s
poems of dockers, eel-fishers, ploughmen, cattle dealers, threshers
and thatchers. Vendler allows the reader to witness her enthusiasm
for the poem’s craft as well as the crafts contained and celebrated
in the stanzas… She eloquently expresses the poet’s confrontation
with contradictions of political violence, as well as sexuality,
death and alienation. Both Seamus Heaney and Helen Vendler, it
becomes evident, have lived and written to strengthen in people a
refined sense for keen details and for courageous statements. As a
critic, Vendler not only has identified the poet’s phases of life
and moments of creative growth and change, she has demonstrated
with zeal how creative and provocative changes have characterized
both the personal and the public life of the poet.
*Philadelphia Inquirer*
Great poets demand great critical readers, and in this regard
Heaney has been blessed by the steady attention of American’s
foremost critic of poetry, Helen Vendler. Vendler’s lucid,
insightful study plots the trajectory of Heaney’s poetic
development from the 1960’s to the present. Focusing on the art of
his poems, she examines the internal structures of words, syntax,
rhythm, voice and symbol that dramatize the poet’s emotional
responses to his experience. At the same time, Vendler demonstrates
how Heaney has expanded and revised the nature of the personal
lyric and cultural pressures of his time… Vendler’s study, in my
view, is the best analysis of Heaney the poet yet published. She
brilliantly unfolds the dynamics of his poetry by her subtle
reading of his language, voice and the deft syntactical shifts that
give his work its lyric power and range of implication. Vendler
demonstrates how Heaney is a poet of ’second thought,’ one whose
work constantly re-scrutinizes itself in terms of the demands of
reality, justice and art… Her superb commentary achieves what
first-rate criticism should do: it makes us want to go back and
read the poems again.
*America*
In this critical study of Ireland’s foremost living poet, Vendler
explores the stylistic and thematic elements that have made Heaney
a poet of stature and wide popularity. Beginning with his first
book, Death of a Naturalist (1966), moving through the developments
and considerations of Heaney’s several volumes of poetry, and
ending with The Spirit Level (1996), Vendler examines the poet’s
changes in technique, language, and structure… This study…goes far
into understanding how the intrusions and struggles of daily life
define what a poet will write about and how he will write it.
*Antioch Review*
Seamus Heaney gives us an unsurpassed unfolding of its eponym’s art
and, also, a plain, clear accounting of Helen Vendler’s central
convictions. From Death of a Naturalist to 1997’s The Spirit Level,
she reveals a Heaney whose essential means are those of lyric
poetry as she herself defines them… Throughout Seamus Heaney,
Vendler’s method is determinedly constructivist, patient, and
unswerving… Heaney’s gentle agon of the saint who dared not move
for fear of disturbing nesting blackbirds in his hand is glossed by
an equally gentle, equally perdurable agon of close reading.
Vendler poses the right questions and, in answer, feels the poem’s
exact effects.
*Colorado Review*
Vendler’s book is a clear, concise, and comprehensive study of
Heaney’s poetic oeuvre… Vendler strikes just the right note in her
analysis of the relationship between Heaney’s evolving poetic style
and the Troubles in Northern Ireland… In her attention to Heaney’s
’second thoughts’…Vendler makes a powerful argument for his humane
political witness, accomplished by being faithful to the aim of
lyric poetry, ’to grasp and perpetuate, by symbolic form, the
self’s volatile and transient here and now’… [An] illuminating
orientation.
*Commonweal*
The task [Helen Vendler] sets herself in this book is to
demonstrate exactly how, by various means and in answer to a range
of provocations, artistic, historic, and personal, the remarkable
growth and development of Heaney’s poetry over the last thirty
years has been achieved… It is difficult to imagine a critic more
in tune with her subject. Alert to the part played by etymological
knowledge and wit in Heaney’s work, she is also, thanks to her
Irish Catholic upbringing, able to clarify for the uninstructed the
meaning of his liturgical references. The political dimensions of
Heaney’s work, the ’dolorous circumstances’ of Ireland, are
referred to where necessary with restraint, compassion, and
brevity… [Helen Vendler is] our period’s most distinguished
literary critic.
*Harvard Review*
[A] luminous new study… One of America’s foremost poetry critics,
[Vendler] disagrees with critics who stress [Heaney’s] poetry’s
political content, focusing instead on the poetry as ’aesthetic and
intellectual experiments.’
*The Monitor*
Seamus Heaney’s readers will welcome this latest study of his work,
written by America’s most distinguished poetry critic, Helen
Vendler… A thoughtful lyric poet with the power to re-think and
re-feel his earlier positions, Vendler’s Heaney emerges as not only
a better craftsman, with profound linguistic resources, but also as
a conscientious citizen of letters, and a restless re-maker of
himself.
*South Atlantic Review*
Vendler is an ideal commentator on Heaney’s development. She keep
her eye firmly on the wording of the poems, only bringing in
evidence from external circumstances when it bears directly on
them… What confirms Vendler’s book as such an excellent
introduction to Heaney is her enlightening analyses of the later
poems of the 1990s… By the end, Vendler leaves little reason to
dispute Heaney’s pre-eminence in all worlds: public, private and
familial. Her book is a triumph for the poet and the reader.
*Toronto National Post*
Combining biography with history and highly developed senses of
aesthetics and poetics, Vendler guides her readers through Heaney’s
work like a naturalist identifying plants in a thick forest. She
tracks the evolution of Heaney’s imagery, his musicality, the beat
and velocity of his poems, his many-tendriled metaphors and
symbols, his flair for storytelling, and his moods, obsessions, and
revelations. Astute, specific, and expressive, Vendler is an ideal
reading companion.
*Booklist*
Quiet virtuosity sustains this work from one of our leading
literary critics… While steadfastly attentive to the words before
her, Vendler shows herself to be agreeably imaginative; also,
remarkably, she’s a critic whose powers sometimes seem akin to
those of her subjects. But she serves, too, as a loyal and true
intermediary between poetry and its potential readers, offering a
concise, plainspoken companion volume to Heaney’s oeuvre without
making the work seem more—or less—difficult than it really is. Her
unusual fairness in an age when criticism is often either
politically motivated or too arcane in its language and concepts to
be read widely should be noted (and noted again). Would that there
were more Vendlers writing criticism—and not about poetry
alone.
*Kirkus Reviews*
Perhaps no late 20th-century poet feels the poignantly complex
responsibilities of literary vocation as deeply as Seaumus Heaney,
and with this book Vendler proves that no reader of his work is
better attuned to those concerns. Following last year’s widely
admired The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, her intelligent, lively
and reflective exploration of the first three decades of the Nobel
laureate’s career succeeds in many tasks: it is both an admiring,
readable introduction and an anthology of best poems, and it builds
an important case for attending to stylistic innovations while
still addressing Heaney’s relation to Northern Ireland’s
troubles.
*Publishers Weekly*
Ms. Vendler's Seamus Heaney serves as a wonderfully succinct
road map to the poet's verse, illuminating the effect that both
private and public events have had on the development of his work,
while explicating the continual evolution of his style. She shows
us how Mr. Heaney has pushed the boundaries of the traditional
lyric poem in his efforts to articulate his changing vision of the
world, even as she helps us to understand his masterly use of
sound, symbol, imagery and parable. -- Michiko Kakutani * New York
Times *
[Helen Vendler's] reading of Heaney is a marvelously illuminating
achievement... Most magically of all, [this book] manages, while
rejecting engagement on the 'thematic' level, to be constantly
stimulating towards other readings while it entertains. -- Bernard
O'Donoghue * Essays in Criticism *
It is perhaps the subject of Northern Ireland that has primarily
been responsible for attracting a large audience to Heaney's work.
In her comprehensive and passionate new book, Seamus Heaney,
the critic Helen Vendler reminds us, however, that 'thematic
elements do not by themselves make for memorable poetry.' Instead,
Vendler...deals chiefly with Heaney's craft, including his poetic
inventiveness and ongoing experimentation with form and
expression... [Vendler] has asserted that while a poet is
inextricably connected to certain struggles, it is the ability to
find new approaches to language to convey those struggles that
determines his or her genius. And Vendler's survey of 11 books of
poetry...clearly makes the case that Heaney has sustained such
attention to language, often brilliantly bringing to light his
thematic , aesthetic and moral concerns... As Vendler shows,
symbol-making is only part of Heaney's excellence. She stresses the
masterful formal designs that convey these symbols throughout the
decades of Heaney's lyrics... One finishes her book with a
remarkably clear understanding of Heaney's outstanding adventures
in form and expression, and of poetry itself. If it's true, as I
believe it is, that only a few poets each century actually change
the way we understand the possibilities of our language, then
Heaney has earned his place as one of those. Most important,
however, one finishes Vendler's critical study more inspired to
return to Heaney's masterful, rigorous and deeply moving poems,
which are in love with listening, life and the life of language. --
Jason Shinder * Newsday *
Vendler comments with the energy of one who has learned great
sensitivity for both the work and the workers described in Heaney's
poems of dockers, eel-fishers, ploughmen, cattle dealers, threshers
and thatchers. Vendler allows the reader to witness her enthusiasm
for the poem's craft as well as the crafts contained and celebrated
in the stanzas... She eloquently expresses the poet's confrontation
with contradictions of political violence, as well as sexuality,
death and alienation. Both Seamus Heaney and Helen Vendler, it
becomes evident, have lived and written to strengthen in people a
refined sense for keen details and for courageous statements. As a
critic, Vendler not only has identified the poet's phases of life
and moments of creative growth and change, she has demonstrated
with zeal how creative and provocative changes have characterized
both the personal and the public life of the poet. -- John Lavin *
Philadelphia Inquirer *
Great poets demand great critical readers, and in this regard
Heaney has been blessed by the steady attention of American's
foremost critic of poetry, Helen Vendler. Vendler's lucid,
insightful study plots the trajectory of Heaney's poetic
development from the 1960's to the present. Focusing on the art of
his poems, she examines the internal structures of words, syntax,
rhythm, voice and symbol that dramatize the poet's emotional
responses to his experience. At the same time, Vendler demonstrates
how Heaney has expanded and revised the nature of the personal
lyric and cultural pressures of his time... Vendler's study, in my
view, is the best analysis of Heaney the poet yet published. She
brilliantly unfolds the dynamics of his poetry by her subtle
reading of his language, voice and the deft syntactical shifts that
give his work its lyric power and range of implication. Vendler
demonstrates how Heaney is a poet of 'second thought,' one whose
work constantly re-scrutinizes itself in terms of the demands of
reality, justice and art... Her superb commentary achieves what
first-rate criticism should do: it makes us want to go back and
read the poems again. -- John F. Desmond * America *
In this critical study of Ireland's foremost living poet, Vendler
explores the stylistic and thematic elements that have made Heaney
a poet of stature and wide popularity. Beginning with his first
book, Death of a Naturalist (1966), moving through the
developments and considerations of Heaney's several volumes of
poetry, and ending with The Spirit Level (1996), Vendler
examines the poet's changes in technique, language, and
structure... This study...goes far into understanding how the
intrusions and struggles of daily life define what a poet will
write about and how he will write it. -- John Kennedy * Antioch
Review *
Seamus Heaney gives us an unsurpassed unfolding of its
eponym's art and, also, a plain, clear accounting of Helen
Vendler's central convictions. From Death of a Naturalist to
1997's The Spirit Level, she reveals a Heaney whose
essential means are those of lyric poetry as she herself defines
them... Throughout Seamus Heaney, Vendler's method is
determinedly constructivist, patient, and unswerving... Heaney's
gentle agon of the saint who dared not move for fear of disturbing
nesting blackbirds in his hand is glossed by an equally gentle,
equally perdurable agon of close reading. Vendler poses the right
questions and, in answer, feels the poem's exact effects. -- Donald
Revell * Colorado Review *
Vendler's book is a clear, concise, and comprehensive study of
Heaney's poetic oeuvre... Vendler strikes just the right
note in her analysis of the relationship between Heaney's evolving
poetic style and the Troubles in Northern Ireland... In her
attention to Heaney's 'second thoughts'...Vendler makes a powerful
argument for his humane political witness, accomplished by being
faithful to the aim of lyric poetry, 'to grasp and perpetuate, by
symbolic form, the self's volatile and transient here and now'...
[An] illuminating orientation. -- Daria Donnelly * Commonweal *
The task [Helen Vendler] sets herself in this book is to
demonstrate exactly how, by various means and in answer to a range
of provocations, artistic, historic, and personal, the remarkable
growth and development of Heaney's poetry over the last thirty
years has been achieved... It is difficult to imagine a critic more
in tune with her subject. Alert to the part played by etymological
knowledge and wit in Heaney's work, she is also, thanks to her
Irish Catholic upbringing, able to clarify for the uninstructed the
meaning of his liturgical references. The political dimensions of
Heaney's work, the 'dolorous circumstances' of Ireland, are
referred to where necessary with restraint, compassion, and
brevity... [Helen Vendler is] our period's most distinguished
literary critic. -- Ann Cobb * Harvard Review *
[A] luminous new study... One of America's foremost poetry critics,
[Vendler] disagrees with critics who stress [Heaney's] poetry's
political content, focusing instead on the poetry as 'aesthetic and
intellectual experiments.' -- Jonathan Allison * The Monitor *
Seamus Heaney's readers will welcome this latest study of his work,
written by America's most distinguished poetry critic, Helen
Vendler... A thoughtful lyric poet with the power to re-think and
re-feel his earlier positions, Vendler's Heaney emerges as not only
a better craftsman, with profound linguistic resources, but also as
a conscientious citizen of letters, and a restless re-maker of
himself. -- Jonathan Allison * South Atlantic Review *
Vendler is an ideal commentator on Heaney's development. She keep
her eye firmly on the wording of the poems, only bringing in
evidence from external circumstances when it bears directly on
them... What confirms Vendler's book as such an excellent
introduction to Heaney is her enlightening analyses of the later
poems of the 1990s... By the end, Vendler leaves little reason to
dispute Heaney's pre-eminence in all worlds: public, private and
familial. Her book is a triumph for the poet and the reader. --
Bernard O'Donoghue * Toronto National Post *
Combining biography with history and highly developed senses of
aesthetics and poetics, Vendler guides her readers through Heaney's
work like a naturalist identifying plants in a thick forest. She
tracks the evolution of Heaney's imagery, his musicality, the beat
and velocity of his poems, his many-tendriled metaphors and
symbols, his flair for storytelling, and his moods, obsessions, and
revelations. Astute, specific, and expressive, Vendler is an ideal
reading companion. -- Donna Seaman * Booklist *
Quiet virtuosity sustains this work from one of our leading
literary critics... While steadfastly attentive to the words before
her, Vendler shows herself to be agreeably imaginative; also,
remarkably, she's a critic whose powers sometimes seem akin to
those of her subjects. But she serves, too, as a loyal and true
intermediary between poetry and its potential readers, offering a
concise, plainspoken companion volume to Heaney's oeuvre
without making the work seem more-or less-difficult than it really
is. Her unusual fairness in an age when criticism is often either
politically motivated or too arcane in its language and concepts to
be read widely should be noted (and noted again). Would that there
were more Vendlers writing criticism-and not about poetry alone. *
Kirkus Reviews *
Perhaps no late 20th-century poet feels the poignantly complex
responsibilities of literary vocation as deeply as Seaumus Heaney,
and with this book Vendler proves that no reader of his work is
better attuned to those concerns. Following last year's widely
admired The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, her intelligent,
lively and reflective exploration of the first three decades of the
Nobel laureate's career succeeds in many tasks: it is both an
admiring, readable introduction and an anthology of best poems, and
it builds an important case for attending to stylistic innovations
while still addressing Heaney's relation to Northern Ireland's
troubles. * Publishers Weekly *
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