Herbert and Modern Poetry: A Response

Helen Vendler Herbert and Modern Poetry: A Response In responding to the three moving papers on Herbert and modern poetry by Professors Sacks, Summers, and White, I am struck by how autobiographical they are. Joseph Summers remembers a friendship as he compares the styles of Herbert and Elizabeth Bishop; James Boyd White speaks as a former Amherst student saturated in the Amherst veneration of Robert Frost; and Peter Sacks speaks with the urgency of his own composition of poetry, as one of the modern poets struggling toward a sublimity that will not be false. Not to be wanting in candor, I should perhaps reveal that when my closest friend learned that I was writing on Herbert, she said, "Oh, so this will be the book about your mother?" (She knew my family well.) My Roman Catholic mother's poems were religious ones, many of them using (perfectly constructed) Herbertian stanzas; they did not, needless to say, exhibit Herbert's startling originalities and naked truthtellings. Our speakers today have emphasized, first, the plain style, as Joseph Summers recalled to us not only Herbert's and Bishop's effect of candor carried by monosyllables, but also the crystalline effect of a single, isolated tear. Yet, though the crystalline and candid Herbert is one Herbert, and the monosyllabic Bishop one Bishop, the fanciful and unplain Herbert and Bishop must not be forgotten. It is true that Herbert reproached himself for the decorative, but only when it was summoned in the service of vanity. When "lovely enchanting language, sugar-cane, honey of roses" was used in the service of God, all embellishments were permitted, and even desired — though the word of faith "Thou art still my God" is still the one thing necessary. The Herbert of stylistic embellishment in such a tour de force as the sonnet "Prayer" (I) may remind us of the Bishop of "The 82Helen Vendler Monument," that baroque construction of many parts arranged at oblique angles to one another. James Boyd White's rapprochement of Frost and Herbert argues that behind apparent candor and disarming simplicity there lie the traps of language and perception; and he shows, with energy and discernment, that a superficial reading of either poet would be a mistaken one — though both poets have been, in the past, often superficially read. Professor White's second, interesting, point is that we should acknowledge the chronological element in our reading: he himselfcame to Frost before Herbert, and Reuben Brower's emphasis on "tone" and "voice" and linguistic complexity in Frost made White able to hear such things in Herbert, too. I am interested in this second point because I believe it is one that is perhaps only recently possible with respect to poetry in English. It used to be that an educated American had read something of every major poet in the canon of English lyric poetry by the age of seventeen or so, given school reading and private reading in widely popular anthologies like The Golden Treasury. My own high-school anthology of British literature had sizable chunks of Sidney, Shakespeare, Herbert, Donne, Milton, and so on, up through Tennyson and Browning and Arnold — so that one naturally came to Frost knowing his roots in Herbert, Wordsworth, and Browning. (But because of my lack of education in American poetry, I did have an experience like Professor White's in reading Robinson and Longfellow after reading Frost, an eerie doubling-back.) Professor White's main point — that a tension exists in both Frost and Herbert between the sententious and the experiential — is an essential one. But I cannot agree that "the sources of order and beauty are found ... in the materials of language" (pp. 62-63 in this volume; emphasis mine). Rather, the poet must intervene to conjoin "charm," "harm," and "arm"; without the mental conjoining, which is the source of order, there is no Paradise of language or heavenly echo of sense. I don't think that one can extrapolate from linguistic arrangeability by an intervening mind to a universe of beauty and order; and Frost's own deep skepticism on this very question seems to be the point of "Design." The effect Frost observes is, he says...