Colin Burrow on Helen Vendler's "Inhabit the Poem"

I want to respond to Colin Burrow’s “Good Weird or Bad Weird” (London Review of Books, September 10, 2026). It’s a review of Helen Vendler’s Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays (2025). Vendler is one of my heroes. I’ve posted over forty notes about her on this blog. She’s written some of my favorite books – Part of Nature, Part of Us (1980), The Music of What Happens (1988), Soul Says (1995). These are works of literary criticism – collections of critical essays – some of the best ever written. 

My response to Burrow’s piece is mixed. I laud him for choosing to write about Vendler. I’m pleased that he appreciates her greatness. At the end of his review he says, “She was as good as it gets.” I agree. But he also says things about her that I question. For example, he says she tends to mention other critics “only when she thinks they’re wrong.” Well, Vendler was a formidable polemicist. It’s one of the reasons I read her. She often took issue with other critics’ views. Recall her brilliant “Lionel Trilling and Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode” (included in The Music of What Happens), in which she strongly argues that Trilling’s Freudian reading of Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode neglects its aesthetic power – it’s invention of “a daring language of disorientation.” But Vendler also praised other critics. In the Introduction to her The Odes of John Keats, she writes,

One book very valuable to me – John Jones’s John Keats’s Dream of Truth – has approached Keats phenomenologically, examining his poetry of sensation in terms of its extraordinary empathetic power, and the struggle of this diction of sensation with Keats’s “dream” of truth. No one interested, as I am, in Keats’s language in its smallest units of phrasing can have failed to be influenced by Jones’s uncanny grasp of Keats’s way of feeling and seeing, and by his flexible shaping of an intellectual way of examining such elusive phenomena.

Other critics Vendler wrote admiringly about include Harold Bloom, Theodor Adorno, Geoffrey Hartman, Roland Barthes, and Seamus Heaney. She calls Heaney’s essays on Wordsworth, Hopkins, and Yeats “bravura pieces of characterization, the best in recent memory”: “A Wounded Man Falling Towards Me,” in Soul Says (1995).

Another questionable statement Burrow makes is that “her use of the critical 'we' often carries the supra-personal authority of someone who doesn’t have reason to doubt her entitlement to the plural form.” Vendler seldom used “we.” Burrow cites an example from her essay on A. R. Ammons (“The Snow Poems and Garbage: Episodes in A. R. Ammons’s Poetics,” in her The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar, 2015). But Vendler’s personal pronoun of choice was “I.” She used it extensively.

Burrow makes another statement about Vendler that I question. He says her view of lyric “is distinctly para-religious.” I don’t think so, not “distinctly.” There’s an element of “soul” (“To me, what soul says seems convincing,” she says in the Introduction to her superb Soul Says), but it’s part of a deeper consideration. The word that I would use, the word that Vendler used over and over, the word that is curiously missing from Burrow’s piece is “aesthetic.” Vendler wrote aesthetic criticism. This is why I love her work. “The aim of aesthetic criticism is to describe the art work in such a way that it cannot be confused with any other art work (not an easy task), and to infer from its elements the aesthetic that might generate this unique configuration”: Introduction to The Music of What Happens. This was her purpose. This was her credo. She got away from it a bit in her last book – Inhabit the Poem. But I love the title. It comes from a wonderful passage in Chapter 2 (“The Enigmatical Beauty of Each Beautiful Enigma”) on Wallace Stevens’s “The Bird with the Coppery Keen Claws”): “What was the work the poet was demanding of me? It was to inhabit the poem, to live willingly in its world.”  

Burrow, in his piece, spends a thousand words defining literary criticism. Why? All he needed to do was quote the above lines from Inhabit the Poem. To his credit, he eventually does.