Literary CriticismHelen Vendler's new book follows on from her monograph on Seamus Heaney in providing some of the most enjoyable and robust criticism of poetry found anywhere today.
Her unapologetic focus on form is practical and highly accessible, opening out meaning in and beyond the poem. Her method stands in contrast to the foreclosure of meaning and fetishisation of technique that characterised the school of "New Criticism" that dominated the mid-20th century. This formalist criticism is enjoying a recent resurgence in Irish critical circles, both in a reaction to and as a development of the 1980s and 1990s cultural warfare between post-colonialism and revisionism. Keeping any middle ground open puts pressure on the critic: Vendler is a virtuoso technical detective whose work points both ways. She depoliticises her subjects by avoiding their larger historical contexts even as the intricate detail of her argument generates the space for new considerations of their politics. Yet this is a space which she herself rarely enters. For this reader, her resistance to relevance is offset by the sense of pure pleasure with which she communicates the act of reading a poem. Vendler revitalises the maxim that poet and reader understand what a poem does only by focusing on how it does it.
In Coming of Age as a Poet, Vendler links four essays to explore at length what makes a first "perfect" poem. This is not the writer's best poem but is the one that first "embodies a coherent personal style" and through which writers signal they have attained their majority.
She identifies these "breakthrough" poems as follows. John Milton's pastoral 'L'Allegro' is described as an inclusive, classically proportioned answer to the question: "What are the sources of happiness?" John Keats's sonnet, 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer', reveals as an intensely private yet potentially shared experience "the felt exaltation of literary discovery". The achievement of T.S. Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' is identified as Eliot's mobilisation of versatile social speech forms to dramatise a culture's prohibition of individuality. Finally, Sylvia Plath's 'The Colossus' discovers "abstraction" - workable symbols and rituals - as adequate for representing the reality of psychological damage caused by her father's achieved death-wish.
Vendler bases her book on the theory that "The youthful writer cannot pursue an evolution to adulthood independent of an ongoing evolution of style. To find a personal style is, for a writer, to become adult". A consequent finding is that "a true writer feels his verbals kinesthetically: imaginatively, he winces with 'pinch', hurls with 'flings'", etc. The requirement that writers identify directly with their language may leave insufficient room for play with words. Without that experimentation (as this book authoritatively shows), successful apprenticeship to the art of poetry cannot happen, let alone the development of a mature style based on language play, such as Mangan's, McGuckian's or Muldoon's. In shackling the poem to autobiography, serious questions arise. Can or should the personal identity of a poet be as stable as the internal workings of the self-sustaining poem (or vice- versa)? Furthermore, Vendler's theory seems premised on the notion of the "born writer" who must obey a command to personal maturity justified by their destiny as artists. Life circumstances or a resistant readership complicate this early sense of destiny for many writers. Yet alongside this leaning towards elitism, Vendler's identification of "the solitary work of living the life of the composing artist" as "its belief in its own necessity" rings true.
Focused as she is on the private realm, yet half-turned towards the public, Vendler generates trust in the reader willing to follow her signals through and beyond her own text - a mark of a master critic. Her public context is seen even in the development of these discrete essays into a book. Their communal jostling testifies to the fallibility of Vendler's axiomatic linking of aesthetic and personal maturity. Coming of Age treats Renaissance, Romantic, Modernist and "Contemporary" examples of poems which, placed together, produce Vendler's favoured chiasmic arc, as they deal consecutively with happiness, authenticity, inauthenticity and unhappiness. Yet the revealed pattern here moves towards dissolving rather than confirming the coherent self. Vendler's confidence that Milton's technical achievement signals his psychological maturity and balance is necessarily less visible when she comes to Plath.
The predestination of the true writer implied by Vendler's tautological premise is challenged most clearly by her book's extended and convincing witness to the hard work of apprenticeship required before the "perfect" poem can be written. She shows this hard work to be a law crossing boundaries of generations, genres and genders. Each analysis in this book seems watermarked by a QED sign of completed proof as it tracks the marriage of technical achievement and affective intellectual meaning. Fascinating to poets and general readers alike is Vendler's examination of the criteria of true poems, why apprentice poems don't succeed, and what exactly changes when a later poem by the same writer really works. Each chapter is characterised by a rare clarity of expression and purpose, a gradual compression of argument and a final closure as the canonical status of these writers is reaffirmed. Vendler flourishes with effect the cinematic tools of close-up and panoptic view, comparative flashback and forward-leap to other poems - tools that particularly serve that canonical status.
Vendler is a true teacher, driven to communicate her sense of the crucial necessity of art with down-to-earth, focused efficiency. That she does this with curtailed reference to art's impact upon the outer world, or that world's impact upon it, challenges a readership fed on a diet of cultural criticism too low in the essential fibre of literary form. In the end we return to her own criteria of proportionality as we are led to restore the balance ourselves.
Catriona Clutterbuck lectures in the Department of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin
Coming of Age as a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath By Helen Vendler
Harvard University Press, 174pp, £15.50