Coming of Age as a Poet (review)

T. S. Eliot once remarked that the apparent purpose of Arthur Symons's Studies of Elizabethan Drama was to "expose" the reader to a "faithful record of the impressions, more numerous or more refined than our own, upon a mind more sensitive than our own." Such, one gathers, is also the purpose of Helen Vendler's Coming of Age of a Poet, a book whose thesis is really just a circular argument meant to display Vendler's sensations. I would say that impressionistic criticism works very well if you happen to be Walter Pater, less well if you happen to be Arthur Symons, and not at all well if you happen to be Helen Vendler.

Three fourths of Coming of Age as a Poet collects the James Murray Brown lectures Vendler gave at the University of Aberdeen in May, 2000. In delivering then publishing these lectures, she has accepted the mantle of public intellectual. To be sure, saying something that is simultaneously comprehensible to the "public" and really worth listening to is difficult—especially since the rise of literary theory, which more often than not introduces jargon and modes of interpretation that tend to make the world of literary criticism all the more insular. Still, there is a splendid tradition of writers who fulfilled the role admirably, headed, to my mind, by W. H. Auden, who wrote in a time no less dedicated to new jargon and radical methods of inquiry than our own.

Vendler's response to the challenge of speaking directly to Educated Joe Public is to deliver what are essentially Introduction to Literature lectures on canonical writers' most canonical works. There is really nothing here for those of us with advanced degrees; I suspect bright Junior and Senior English majors will not find their knowledge extended very much by what is said here. Educated Joe will likely say to himself, "I don't see what Rush and George are complaining about—English literature courses haven't changed much since I took them forty years ago."

Vendler purposes to consider the first "perfect" poem that John Milton, John Keats, T. S. Eliot, and Sylvia Plath ever wrote. Oddly, "perfect" doesn't mean flawless—at one point, she asks if there is anything "wrong" with one of her perfect poems and then answers that there is (133). It turns out, a perfect poem is that poem "which first succeeds in embodying a coherent, personal style" (1); it is characterized by "confidence, mastery, and above all ease." It is the poem for which "the poet comes of age as a poet to be reckoned with" (2). Such generalities can hardly be called criteria. They sound a lot like the abstractions of bad wine criticism. Her actual principle of selection is revealed when she adds that a perfect poem is "one that will become canonical within the poet's oeuvre: its imaginative powers are so characteristic and deep, and its characteristics so match them in ambition, that an anthologist or teacher is likely to choose it when illustrating the early work of an author" (2). It is bracing, in a way, to see such a bald endorsement of the canon, especially since so many of my colleagues seem to believe that a work's canonization automatically renders it ideologically suspect. Nonetheless, in this day and age it is astonishing that Vendler never even bothers to ask if her conception of the poet's "personality" is perhaps a product of the canon. Her subjective criteria allow her to discard and elevate works according to her whim, so any work which does not accord with what she considers the poet's true personality she can simply discount. And how can we tell what that true personality is? Why, by the person revealed in the four perfect poems.

Such circular, a priori reasoning can hardly be called a compelling argument, but I do not believe Vendler truly believes her views can be contravened anyway. For the record, the perfect poems are Milton's...