A Game of Feet

Now that she has lived a little longer than W. B. Yeats did, Helen Vendler has earned the right to indulge herself in the sort of work that she loves most and does best: the passionate scrutiny of lyric poems that present a good measure of emotional excitement, intellectual richness, and technical achievement. In Frostian terms, such work is play; in Yeatsian, such labor is blossoming. With either approach the result for the reader can be satisfying and stimulating. Here is someone who reads poetry in the genuine senses of reading and poetry: poetry as poetry and not another thing—not psychology, not politics, not philosophy, not linguistics, nor anything approachable by theory.

Such concentration on the thing itself was the stuff of much criticism between 1930 and 1975, whether practiced by New Critics or by Aristo-telians, admittedly in different ways (John Crowe Ransom in 1952 argued that Aristotle’s Poetics “does handsomely by the plot, and has nothing very impressive to say for the poetry”—meaning diction and prosody). Since 1975, however, much academic study has been more centrifugal than centripetal, tending to flee the central aesthetic questions in favor of excursions in one or another of the many enticing peripheries of art.

Ransom (again in “Humanism at Chicago”) observed, “Critics generally never offer enough of a theory about the meters so far as I know; there seems to have been a singular lapse of the critical imagination.” That is certainly more of a problem today than it was in 1952. Few critics and scholars say anything special about rhetoric, diction, and prosody; and teachers seldom mention such things, except in disparagement. In forty years of university teaching, I have not met forty students who can parse a simple sentence or scan a simple line. I had to learn such matters in the eighth grade, almost sixty years ago, thanks to a most emphatic teacher who imparted a passion for poetry along with a percussive insistence on rhythm and meter. The world is probably full of people about my age, and Vendler’s, who still remember subjects like iambic pentameter and blank verse; but the paradigm shifted soon after our early schooling, so that younger people, now called baby boomers, are not asked to learn such subjects. The lamentable deficiency certainly shows in their reading and their writing, whether creative or expository.

Among modern critics Vendler is at her best with somewhat challenging poems from the Renaissance all the way to the contemporary scene, and she can write about Charles Simic, Charles Wright, and Jorie Graham, say, with the same sympathy and authority she has shown with Shakespeare, Herbert, Pope, Keats, Whitman, and many more recent poets. She has previously written about Yeats, but her new book, Our Secret Discipline, is the first to restrict itself to matters of versification. Its most appealing feature is its emphasis on what Yeats did with certain stanzas, especially those with eight lines. With a most original set of insights and techniques she enters into the variegated world of some of Yeats’s greatest poems, especially those written from 1916 until his death in 1939. Vendler’s approach illuminates the grand ottava rima poems that Yeats composed during his last fifteen years: “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Among School Children,” parts of “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” part of “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” “Coole and Ballylee, 1931,” “The Choice,” parts of “Vacillation,” part of “A Woman Young and Old,” part of “Parnell’s Funeral,” “The Gyres,” “The Municipal Gallery Re-visited,” “The Statues,” and “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” If he had written nothing else, those poems in ottava rima (iambic pentameter, rhyming abababcc) would guarantee him a place among the greatest poets in English.

Yeats also wrote notably in another eight-lined stanza, which is more eccentric in design. Its first, second, third, fifth, and eighth lines are pentameter; the fourth, sixth, and seventh are either trimeter or tetrameter. The rhyme scheme is always aabbcddc. It is possible that Yeats devised this peculiar measure himself, but...